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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."
Yes, it's true that since the Mac mini uses a 2.5" laptop hard drive by default, which is why the disk performance is relatively poor. This is why you can achieve greater performance with a 3.5" drive coupled with a FireWire enclosure. But many of the FireWire enclosures out there are what I would call, well, damned ugly. And huge. Way more huge than they need to be. And way too ugly and clunky to go with a computer like the Mac mini, unless you bought it completely for price and could care less about appearances.
Enter miniMate: a FireWire 400/USB 2.0 hub with integrated Ultra ATA 3.5" disk bay with up to a 400GB 7200RPM disk, all in an enclosure aesthetically designed exactly like the form factor of the Mac mini (except a bit shorter):
http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp
a year ago, we stuck with hp while deciding upon a new standard laptop as the nc6000's had 5400 rpm drives vs a couple ibm units we were evaluating which had 4200rpm's. I wonder if anyone could ever decommoditize themselves as a pc maker by promising to sell quicker machines at a minor price premium - how much more would it cost to install 512MB and a 7200rpm drive instead of 256MB and 5400rpm?
ostiguy
You buy a system with a 4500 RPM drive, and you're surprised that an external FW 5400 or 7200 RPM drive performs better? Furrfu ...
Next on slashdot: a new and exciting way to suck eggs.
If you're in the crowd that would be bothered by a slow HDD, then I'd expect you to understand the implications of the mini's specs. I'm aware of this, yet bought a mini anyway, and it's chugging along fine for my needs, without any external storage.
The form factor sold the machine for me - I don't want to go adding an external drive to the machine, even for a performance boost. I knew I wouldn't be playing Unreal Tournament 2k4 or DooM3 on the machine, I bought it to have a small form factor desktop in addition to my laptop.
That said, the findings of improved speed with an external firewire drive is hardly surprising. Laptop hard drives (which the Mini uses) are notoriously slow, and if you're one of those who got a 4200 RPM drive with their Mini it's even worse than normal.
Still, nifty to know it works.
I'm curious though - has anyone replaced their mini's hard drive with a higher RPM laptop drive? Did that help matters much? I wouldn't mind going for a speed upgrade if I can keep the sleek, tiny form factor =)
-Amich
Can one actually run the OS off the Firewire hard drive?
...and no vested interest of any kind in anything relating to it, and didn't submit the story.
But thanks for your concern!
Recent Macs boot from a firewire drive just fine.
Soccer Goal Plans
I use a 120 GB Simpletech USB 2.0 drive as my capture/video editing repository and it works smashingly well. One time I forgot about saving the project to the Powerbook drive and was wondering why in heck iMovie HD was dropping frames and discovered I was using the internal drive. The USB 2.0 drive performs WAY better.
Gorkman
here (or google...): http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitachi_travelstar6 0GB_7200/travelstar60GB_7200rpm.html
It seems that to make the mini even worth using is to spend lots of money on upgrades.
/. No matter how fast a computer people here have, many of them will want to tinker with thier computers to make them faster. Like people who soup up cars.
No, this is not true. Remember you are at
The tinkering is fun.
The Mac mini is a fantastic little machine. I have an AMD XP2800+ with 2 7200 RPM drives and 2GB of DDR RAM, but I mostly use my little Mac mini because of Mac OS X. A faster computer is always nicer, but part of the minis appeal is its size and price. It runs OS X nicely given this in mind.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
This just in..
Mac user upgrades slow standard hard drive to a faster one and then gets better performance. A PC user was overheard saying "no shit".
I bought the mini for the price and form factor with the plan to upgrade it for performance. Adding RAM helped a lot with the pin-wheel-o'-death, but I haven't gotten to the HD upgrade yet. And, I haven't been watching the HR market lately.
What's good in the 2.5", 5400-7200RPM 80GB+/- market now? I'm looking to avoid the scenerio where a crappy drive fails in the 2nd year of the warrenty and you just have to decide to get the next one bigger rather than do the warrenty repair.
Before you throw it away, let me know - I'll buy it from you.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
There has been a whole spate of these "I bought a Mac Mini, found out it really was a cheap, low-end computer, and then spent additional money to bring it up to a barely usable level" articles recently. Most of them involve either major, warranty-voiding modifications to the chassis, or as is the case here, ugly external peripherals that negate the main attraction of the Mini, its external appearance.
People seem to be buying these things as fashion accessories rather than making a serious decision based on their computer needs. It has one DIMM slot, a relatively slow CPU, and a notebook hard drive -- if thats not what you want, you should look for something else rather than expecting the rest of the world to salute your cleverness in partially addressing its shortcomings. If you don't really need a Mac, you can put together a PC for under $500 with a real hard drive and much better expandability. If you want a $500 computer to run OS X on, you can get a used G4 with specifications similar to a Mini, except again with useful internal expansion capacity. And if you want to spend more than that, well, you have the entire rest of the current Apple lineup.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
I upgraded my GF4 MX400 to a 9800XT and got 200% performance increase. I submitted the story and my links which had benchmarks to show the increase, my story was rejected. I guess upgrading a slow part to a faster part in the Mini seems so much more sexy then upgrading a PC.
Funniest part of the the article, dude pulled out something he had pitched in his closet and it is faster then the drive in his brand new machine. Half the Mac diehards rate that as insightful, the other half make excuses and try to justify why the standard Mini drive is so slow.
from Feb 4th 2005
REVIEW: Mac mini -- internal and external hard drive tests
http://www.barefeats.com/mini01c.html
good analysis w/ lotsa pretty graphs
The real crime here is that Apple would have even shipped a computer with a 4200rpm drive.
:)
Yes I understand the slight cost difference and the slight possibility of heat difference, but a 4200rpm Drive? Give me a Break; it is almost 3 generations old in technology.
It is hard to even buy a laptop drive that is not at least 5400rpm anymore, and the 7200rpm and upcoming 10000rpm drives equal desktop hard drive performance.
They saved what, maybe $10-25 on the computer by using the 4200rpm drive, and yet I would imagine almost every user would rather pay the extra money to have a computer with a hard drive with 'normal' performance.
How is this innovative or cutting edge, when the technology they are shoving at Mac users, and first time Mac buyers that are not technical was top of line 5 years ago?
Apple can do SO much better than this, and we need to remind Apple that if they want to be the innovators and 'technology' leaders they can't get away with giving people sub quality performance and outdated technology.
I know a lot of people here love Apple and their Macs, but there are times when you need to tell Apple what you think and PUSH them to DO the right things and PUSH them to provide truly the best technology they can.
(In. example, you still can't buy a Mac Laptop with a high resolution LCD Screen, you still can't buy a Mac with graphics that are even in same class as top of the line PC graphics cards, The G5 is a great CPU, but even OSX (yes even Tiger) does not fully even utilize the features of this CPU. Tiger isn't' even a real 64bit OS, and should be (apple controls all the hardware, this should be easier for them than Microsoft and yet Microsoft is the one with a real 64bit OS for consumers. There are numerous other issues that truly bother me when people tell me they are the 'technology leader when it comes to graphic design or imaging' - technically the hardware falls short of what is available to the PC world.
One other note on the G5, if Microsoft can take a tri-core G5 based CPU and put it a Video Game Console (Xbox360) at 3+GHz, why can't Apple do this in a desktop system and be a technology leader?
Ironic that the hard hitting G5 based Tri-core CPU from IBM is running Windows NT and Direct X for gaming and will be sold for playing Games.
Ok, I got off a bit on an Apple Rant, but darn it I used to love Apple back in the late 80s, and they keep disappointing me and disappointing me. I had so hoped OSX would be the saving factor for what I had expected from Apple, yet it is still catching up to Microsoft and Open Source OSes in a lot of ways and Apple still is NOT providing the cutting edge hardware that they 'market' that they are.
Apple fans, don't just accept what Apple gives you is always great, question it, compare it to the PC world, and if it isn't truly the level you expect from Apple, TELL THEM. Maybe some good user feedback will push Apple a bit more.
Take Care all... and sorry about the long rant.
I don't consider my clamshell iBook G3 333 or my PowerMac G4 Dual-533, or my iMac G3 400 MHz to be recent. All of them boot from firewire. Indeed the only firewire Mac that doesn't boot from firewire is the very first one: the blue & white PowerMac G3 tower. If you're looking for a Mac on the cheap, my advice is that you take a pass on any Blue & White - it isn't worth any price IMHO, and not just due to the non-booting firewire.
--- What?
There is some truth to what you say.
;-)
However, there are two other aspects you fail to acknowlege.
Firstly, most people, most of the time, are not waiting for their computer to do something. It's the chair-to-computer interface that is the bottleneck (people interacting with their software), so an increase in efficiency here is a big boost in (what I would call) performance. There's a lot more to performance than GFLOPS - remember, a computer is a tool, not an end in itself.
Secondly (and perhaps less importantly), although the specs of Macs might not be as great as PCs, the quality of their componentry is arguably better. Macs, in general, have a low hardware fail rate, and this could be attributed to better (albeit, less powerful) hardware. Many 'high-performance' PCs, especially those that are relatively cheap, are not made by Tier 1 companies from reliable hardware*.
*This is my opinion only, and hasn't been extensively researched.
Spend the extra money on RAM instead, the cacheing will more then fix the drive RPM issue.
;)
Like any computer, once you run the apps once, they load near instantly.
And if you're doing heavy file serving, well... that's not what a mini is for now is it
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Compared to OS9, X's accessing our server is like slogging through mud, I can tell most of it is it hitting the server trying to get the icons for all the files (ALL the files), and there is no way to turn off custom icon view. We are using AppleTalk, and I have heard SMB is a marked improvement, not because it's the fault od appletalk, but the waty X handles appletalk.
Also USB sucks too, you can't boot from a USB CD in 10, (9 is no problem, speed is not that bad in 9, but really lame in 10). (I suspect it has to dso with the overhead 10 has in device dection on the USB.) Maybe it's all thier legacy interfaces (ATA and USB) that are speed dogs.
Apple has a bit of work on improving some of these OS X core components to make me say it really rocks.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Apple's web page says they're "inexpansive but never cheap", even though they've used a 4200rpm wimp-sized drive - oh, well :-) If the cheap 40GB version isn't big enough for you, you're probably better off getting an external drive than upgrading to the cheap 80GB version, and if it doesn't perform well enough, add RAM, because 256MB isn't enough for everybody.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"And this may be slightly offtopic, but considering the speeds we can get nowdays with Firewire 800"
The Mac mini neither has FireWire 800, nor any extension means to add that.
"why go with expensive PATA/SATA"
Huh? PATA drives are the cheapest on the market, and SATA are hardly more expensive.
"perhaps an internal firewire drive"
FireWire drives don't exist, and FireWire isn't designed for internal use either. External FireWire enclosures for internal PATA or SATA drives, on the other hand, exist indeed.
Either way, this is moot, as the Mac mini *does* have both FireWire 400 and USB 2, but *doesn't* have FireWire 800, nor any space for 3.5 inch hard drives, nor any space to extend capabilities. It can only host a 2.5 inch drive inside, and all 2.5 inch drives are slower and more expensive than their 3.5 equivalents.
They are also, however, easier on power, quieter, and cooler. And, of course, smaller.
Here is a slashdot counterpart:
Fair comment. I have another equally subjective one:
Am I alone in getting the impression that some of Apple's products are falling down on their prior reputation for being of high quality? I'm not just referring to the matter referred to in the original post; a case in point is all those dodgy iPod batteries. And those two broken Combo drives I've got on a desk over there...
You can get an EIDE/SATA 400GB drive for about $250 now, and the 400GB version of this thing is $560.
$310 is a lot to pay for a drive enclosure and a port hub, even if it does look like the macMini. By the time you've purchased the mini itself, this thing, and assuming you're using it stand-alone - a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.. you might as well buy a BigMac and get a faster + more expandable system.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Ok - I just did a test on my Mac using Xbench to give myself some objective basis for comparison. And I realise that a benchmarking app does not necessarily equate to real world performance, but it's the best I could do.
I have a 5400rpm internal HDD in my Powerbook, and a WD 200Gb 7200rpm w 8mb cache drive in an external case, which is connected via Firewire 800.
On a pure comparison of disk performance using xbench, the internal HDD scored 65.54 and the external drive scored 57.12 (where the higher number is better). That says to me that at least as far as benchmarking is concerned, an average speed internal HDD can still outperform a very good external drive connected via even Firewire800.
Overall, I wonder when people say "it feels faster" whether it reallly is, or whether they just want to believe that it is
I replaced the stock drive in my 17" RevA powerbook with the 7200rpm 60gb Hitachi.
No change in noise, heat or battery drain.
The performance gain is notcieable and very welcome.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
That may be true of the drives Apple is using, but it definately is not true of 2.5" drives. In fact, 2.5" drives are almost always going to be faster because of lower rotational mass, as well as other factors (caching on the drive, number of platters, etc.)
Right now my primary laptop drive is close to 40% faster than a brand-new Maxtor drive in a very fast server in the server room:
This reminds me of our old mac plus. We had an external HDD. It was called a "Quark" I think and it was about as big as a decent sized VCR.
It's was 10 megabytes if I remember correctly. And you could boot off of it! (If you used the Quark Loader boot disk).
Then we got a 386 with a 40meg hard drive INSIDE IT (wow).
First of all, let's recap. When Apple introduced the G5 two years ago, you may remember the ads which proclaimed "The World's First 64-bit Personal Computer." What they forgot to mention was a pretty fundamental flaw with their claim: their flagship OS X could not actually run any 64-bit applications!
It has taken two years and 2 OS releases for Apple to add limited support for 64-bit applications to OS-X. Even today, apps which utilize any graphical application framework libraries (i.e. any GUI application) cannot run in 64-bit mode. Apple actually expects software vendors to redesign their GUI apps to fork off 64-bit processes to perform any "compute-intensive" or "memory-intensive" work. Right! Nevertheless, I'm sure some vendors will do this work, no matter how silly.
Contrast this with 64-bit support in Windows. Microsoft released its first 64-bit version of Windows in q1 2002 (see PC World announcement from 2001). But few actually remember because it ran only on Itanium, on hardware which virtually no one except elite vendors could purchase. That version of Windows was quite limited, but even then not as limited as Apple's latest Tiger. Even in 2002, 64-bit Windows apps could run in full GUI mode and could utilize all system libraries except for multimedia decoding and DirectX libraries.
The point is this: for app vendors to port their apps to 64-bit Windows, very little work is required. In many cases, simply recompiling does the trick. In other cases, broken integer-pointer casts must be fixed, but little else. Certainly no redesign is required! To make this app transition so smooth required a large amount of work. Millions of lines of code making up the entire Windows codebase (not just the relatively small kernel) had to be made 64-bit clean. Additionally, it took lots of design thought to solve some of the tricky AppCompat issues to enable 32-bit and 64-bit apps to live side-by-side. You can read alot about how this works in Windows XP Pro x64 here.
Second of all, your claim that 64-bit Windows drivers are unavailable and unstable is complete balderdash. I would love to hear which currently-shipping 64-bit systems out there don't have available drivers (and I mean vendor-supplied systems here, not some homebrew with a random motherboard). I would also like to hear about ones that are buggy and unstable. MSN and several other top-tier internet sites have already switched to x64-based servers. From personal experience, I have 64-bit XP running on at least 4 different motherboard chipsets in 24/7 environments and I have yet to see a blue screen on any of them. All with inbox drivers: I didn't lift a finger.
Granted, vendor-supplied drivers for peripherals which don't work with class drivers is currently limited on Windows x64, as happens whenever a new version of Windows comes out that requires driver changes (remember Win2k?). But it's extremely ironic to hear Apple people use the term "limited" in reference to hardware support, even referring to Windows x64. I'd bet that inbox device support for x64 is greater than the totality of device support for OSX Tiger. And as for peripherals, most USB and Firewire devices will work fine, because they utilize class drivers which Microsoft owns and therefore ports itself.
Yes, you can bet that Apple is embarrassed by its lack of 64-bit application support even with its latest Tiger release. But Apple has done a masterful job of sweeping that lack of support under the carpet with fantastic marketing. I know many G5 owners who had no clue until I told them that their G5 actually could not run 64-bit applications because OS-X did not support it. I actually feel kind of bad for them: I'm sure they felt a bit miffed that their promised "World's First 64-bit Personal Computer" was not actually a useful 64-bit system. I know I would be.
Part of it might be that badly written apps, and badly written web pages, assume that 1px has a given physical size. This assumption is broken with very high resolution screens, causing things to be too small and unusable.
Common culprits are the `px' CSS measure used for font size. Another big one is apps that do all their layout in px with an assumed font and size, so that their layout breaks horribly if you up the font size - which you have to do to make it readable on your screen.
Personally, I'm working quite happily on a 120dpi display, but then I'm using a suitable OS and set of apps to handle it.
..considering the MacMini uses a 2.5" laptop HD - I've got doubts about using such a device 24/7 as my normal desktops operate. and performance of such devices is way behind the curve of 3.5" HD's - eg the fluid bearing 80-250Gb Seagate Barracuda IV range with 2MB of cache. they could have used a 3.5" drive if the MacMini were just a little bit bigger. Typical Apple though. never makes the best product available for the customer...always some shortcoming so you buy the next model when its released. ah well. I can see plenty of people buying a specially designed module which sits underneath and compliments the Mac Mini (think GBA game player for GameCube)
No matter how fast a computer people here have, many of them will want to tinker with thier computers to make them faster. Like people who soup up cars.
If by "people who soup up cars" you mean "ricers", then yes.
OMG ROFLMAO KIKI I just overclocked my AMD K400 to 12 Parsecs!1!!!! Zerg Rush!
BACKGROUND :-)
t icles/mini/
t icles/mini/dock/
l e+IDC+2.5%22+IDE+Laptop+Gender+Changer
:-( But here is the plan:
I bought my mini for the software. Years ago I paid for a miniDV camcorder, because I knew that someday I would be able to afford a computer to edit the footage with. That day finally came!
But the HDD stinks. External SATA is possible, and the best answer. Here's why...
OPTIONS
FW 400
While I *might* go for an external FW 400 solution, the mini only has one FW port... and copying DV material from a camcorder to a FW HDD on the same channel is a no-no.
USB 2.0
slower than FW 400 on the mini, according to what I've read. But more importantly, the mini won't boot from USB.
External 3.5" PATA
Ah, now we're talking! Check out these articles: 4 sweet solutions, all of which allow use of 3.5" HDDs on the mini's own ATA/100 controller:
mini in a PC box
http://www.appletalk.com.au/articles/miniserver/
mini with an external drive box housing an ATA HDD
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/ar
mini ensconsed in a Centris 660
(Check out the XBench scores table)
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/ar
And best of all (IMHO), the purple mini
http://macmod.com/content/view/273/2/
External 3.5" SATA
The problem with the external PATA solutions is that the form factor sucks. Which got me thinking: If I could only use one of those fancy new SATA cables...
PARTS LIST
1. PATA to SATA bridgeboard:
http://www.google.com/search?q=PATA2SATA
2. IDE Hard Drive Cable Adapter - 2.5'' to 3.5''
http://www.google.com/search?q=StarTech+IDE4044
3. 44 Pin Male to Male IDC 2.5" IDE Laptop Gender Changer
http://www.google.com/search?q=+44+Pin+Male+to+Ma
DETAILS
I don't yet have the money to do this project, or you would have already heard the results.
Assemble the three components together (and trim off the unneeded power connection from the 2.5" to 3.5" cable adapter). You now have an assembly that fits within the space normally occupied by the mini's 2.5" HDD.
WARNING: the real unknown is whether or not you can actually then snake an SATA cable from the bridge board and out the back (or side) of the mini. But I think it will work. Assuming it does...
RESULTS
There are more and more SATA drive enclosures hitting the market. This year the trend is multiplexing backplanes, so that you can RAID multiple SATA drives in the enclosure and connect them via one channe back to the computer.
Pick an attractive SATA drive enclosure, plug it in, connect it to the mini, and off you go!
Phil Lawrence
--
feel free to email me if you'd like details about the success or failure of the project, once I get the parts together
I've been using a real 64-bit OS for over 10 years now, using a true 64-bit API, and all I can say about this issue is:
1. If you really need 64-bit, you know it.
If you just think 64-bit is all about speed, you're confused... the reason the 64-bit Alpha was fast and stayed at the front of the pack with far less effort than Intel had to go through (at least until it got Compaqted) was less the fact that it was 64-bit (in fact programs in 32-bit mode were often faster) than the fact that DEC was able to start with a clean slate and design a good fast CPU architecture without having loads of backwards compatibility to worry about.
The reason AMD's 64-bit stuff is fast is the same, they're able to shed a lot of the IA32 cruft and add a lot more register file space.
And that's why 64-bit Power PC doesn't give you the same boost, because it's already a pretty good CPU architecture, it doesn't have a need for a massive overhaul.
So unless you REALLY need 64 bit, and if you do you already know you need it and you know why you need it and you're not whinging about whether Apple's 64-bit is "real" or not because you're already using it, it doesn't matter if your 64-bit is real or not, because you don't need it and won't use it even if you have it.
2. If you think Windows is "real" 64-bit, think again.
Even the latest 64-bit Windows isn't using a pure 64-bit model, even in 64-bit mode. DEC went with a full 64-bit model that matched the native Alpha 64-bit register set, and most of the other UNIX systems went with 64-bit longs and 64-bit pointers, but Windows uses 32-bit longs and 64-bit pointers, and you need a special "long long" data type to do pointer and offset arithmetic. So, using code that actually addresses more than 4G of RAM on Windows is going to remain tricky for a while.
Apple uses the intermediate model, with 64-bit pointers, and both 64 and 32-bit integers (int and long). This requires a little more complexity than the Alpha 64-bit model, but it lets 64-bit programs that people are already using work without change. So while you can't call the 32-bit GUI libraries from 64-bit mode, most 64-bit code is server software or command-line batch applications that don't make GUI calls at all... and that'll just work on Tiger.
I know many G5 owners who had no clue until I told them that their G5 actually could not run 64-bit applications because OS-X did not support it.
The fact that they had no clue means they didn't need it, and the only advantage of the 64-bit hardware for them (like for virtually everyone else in the entire world, except for people who already knew about it because anyone who really needed it was on top of that kind of detail) was that it let them use more than 4G of physical RAM. shared among all their (32-bit and WAY less than 4G long) apps.
And from the very first the Powermac G5 supported up to 8G.
So for the only purpose that mattered to them, they already had a useful 64-bit system.
The people who ought to feel miffed are the ones who've already been using ILP64 or LP64 code for years, who will have to port it to the IL32P64 Windows mess.