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FireWire for 75% Better Mac mini Disk Performance
peterdaly writes "As a proud new owner of a Mac mini, I quickly discovered the internal hard drive performance was so pathetic compared to what I was used to that I needed to do something about it ... preferably on the cheap. I ended up trying a FireWire attached storage enclosure and using an older 80GB drive I had in my closet from a dead PC. My mini got about a 75 percent disk performance increase for about $50 (or $100 if you need a drive). Here is a benchmark of before and after as well as information about my research and upgrade. If you already have at least 512MB RAM, this may be the best performance bang for your buck if you're looking for your mini to be faster and more responsive."
7200rpm notebook drive?
Bottles.
If you really want a performance boost, don't use a mac, let alone a mac mini. There are very few benchmarks, real or synthetic, that a mac comes even close to a PC. Apple always uses low performance parts (such as a slow hard drive) in it's hardware, and overcharges those who purchase it. Apple tries to make their hardware look like it's great because of a flashy number such as "1 GB of RAM," but it's PC133, or "100 GB Hard Disk," but only 4200 rpm with 50 ms seek time. I've pointed out the hardware problems many times to those thinking apple is a top performer or economical in price. Just find a PC with the same or better hardware and look at the price comparison. The PC performs better in most applications as well. The only good part about a mac is the user friendliness. Don't confuse that with performance.
-1 Old, dull troll