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."

Comments

And if you want something really cool

[daveschroeder]

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

Re:And if you want something really cool

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

snip
The internal drive is slow cause it is a cheap/low end drive. A decent 7200 rpm notebook drive as a replacement will greatly improve the performance of a mini. (And the run cooler) Just upgrade the internal drive (yes, many people have done this) and you dont need an ugly extra external drive or even a pretty one that takes up more space.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[daveschroeder]

Can you buy two of those and run them in RAID-1?

Absolutely.

With Disk Utility, it's just a matter of dragging the disks into a RAID set, and you're done.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[value_added]

... relatively poor ... way more huge ... way too ugly"

A thoughtful analysis if ever I read one.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[itistoday]

*ahem* For those not aware Disk Utility is a free hard disk utility that comes with every mac, and every OS X installation.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Can you buy two of those and run them in RAID-1?

1 macMini: $500
2 400GB external drives: $1000
Spending $1500 to run RAID on an entry-level machine: priceless.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Not terribly clever are we?

Lets make it a diagram.

Care scale
==========

- -- Care a great deal
|
|
|
|
- -- Don't care at all

In order for the phrase 'I could not care less' to be true, it must not be possible to move any further down the above scale.

Thus, you must be at the bottom.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[steve_bryan]

Hmm, I'm not certain if I am reading your comment correctly but if you are asking if a Mac can format a floppy while doing other tasks the answer is a qualified YES. Macs haven't had floppy drives for quite a few years but with OS X the Mac is much more robust and stable than WindowsXP at doing things like formatting disks as just one more task that can easily be done in the background. Of course you can still buy floppy drives from third party companies if you want to format some floppies on a Mac and check my assertion.

My personal experience with loading down OS X with tasks versus doing the same sort of thing with WindowsXP is that the Mac just keeps working while my Windows box becomes unusable and often will crash. For instance if I'm watching HDTV on my PC and absent mindedly use Samba to transfer a file to or from my PC it is time to reboot. I can do things on my PC when it is formatting but it isn't pretty. Finally, the thing that really matters is that Azureus functions invisibly in the background on my Mac but it is a pain the butt if I try to run it on my PC and anything else happens.

So oddly enough that old chesnut about Windows users happily formatting floppies in the background to the amazement of Mac pre OS X users has been turned completely around for OS X.

not surprising

[ostiguy]

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

I bought the MacMini for the form factor..

[Amich]

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

Yes

[peterdaly]

Recent Macs boot from a firewire drive just fine.

Been using a USB 2.0 Drive....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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.

ask and you are answered...

[mbaudis]

here (or google...): http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitachi_travelstar6 0GB_7200/travelstar60GB_7200rpm.html

Re:Too bad

[Shanep]

It seems that to make the mini even worth using is to spend lots of money on upgrades.

No, this is not true. Remember you are at /. 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.

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.

This just in..

[Anonymous Coward]

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 don't get it

[foonf]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[revscat]

[Intelligent, coherent argument snipped..] And if you want to spend more than that, well, you have the entire rest of the current Apple lineup.

I agree.

But (and you knew that was coming, dincha) there are people out there who enjoy spending their time putting nitrox afterburners and onboard computers on '76 El Caminos. Some people enjoy taking less technically advanced machines and making them perform better than the original designers imagined.

Now, I personally don't do this, but I can see how someone could enjoy doing that with their time. Not my thing, but, ok.

Re:I don't get it

[EggyToast]

Part of it's fashion, but another part of it is form factor and noise.

The mini is damn small. You can put it next to your monitor, like an external CD drive, and that's your entire computer. Get one with wireless/bluetooth and the only cable you need is to the monitor, right next to it.

That's a far cry from a huge, loud box that sits under the desk. Even the smaller shuttle PCs are big compared to the mini, and much louder (I know, I've had the shuttle PCs, and sold it off because it was too loud).

My girlfriend has a mini and is pretty abusive to it, application-wise. She usually keeps 6-10 beefy apps up at any given time, and while there's some lagginess in opening programs, she's otherwise very happy with it *because* it's small and quiet and does just what she wants.

I've got a 733 G4 at work and I wish I had a mini instead -- the damn thing sounds like it's going to take off, and it's about 2 feet from my head. If I couldn't wear headphones at work I'd likely be crazy by now.

They're already very usable computers. The articles you're reading are by those who want to max out benchmarks and make it appear like a much beefier computer than it really is -- probably more because it's like a challenge than as real usage tests. But as someone who sits a few feet from someone's mac mini, I can say that if the only reason someone's disregarding a mac mini is because it's "not as powerful as a big loud desktop," they're missing the point.

Ultimately, I think we're agreeing but on different points. So don't interpret this as an angry rant -- just pointing out and clarifying from someone who is once removed from a very happy OOTB mini owner.

My similar story was rejected

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:My similar story was rejected

[keytoe]

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.

The standard Mini drive is slow because it's a freakin $500 computer - but it's in a unique and interesting enclosure.

Apple doesn't make commodity hardware, and they never have. Even though this system falls into the 'commodity' price range (and barely, at that) that doesn't make it a commodity box. You're paying for the engineering it took to stick all that shit into a tiny, silent enclosure.

If you want power, buy power. If you want cheap, buy cheap. But understand - Apple doesn't make cheap, and they never have. You can always build something yourself if you want a good mix of powerful and cheap - but good luck shoving that into an enclosure that even resembles the Mini.

And good luck running OS X on it.

this is not NEW news. check bareFeats.com

[henk]

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...

[TheNetAvenger]

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. :)

Re:I have nothing to do with that product...

[TerranFury]

Don't worry; I'm not so paranoid to think that you're involved in an elaborate conspiracy to sell a hard drive enclosure! Any true conspiracy theorist can tell you that you'd need at least a black helicopter or two for that...

Perhaps, so as to avoid future misunderstandings, the two of us can start a conspiracy to get the W3C to add a <joke> tag to the next draft of HTML...

Re:Question

[vought]

Yes. In my mind as an IT person, one of the chief advantages of a Mac is that you can boot any Mac with built-in FireWire from a FireWire disk - including an iPod.

You can prevent this from happening by setting an Open Firmware password, but for re-imaging machines, it is a godsend.

As a bonus for those of us who want more utility out of our portable boot disks, all FireWire-equipped PowerBooks and any FireWire equipped desktop since some of the later G4s have the ability to boot in what Apple appropriately calles "FireWire disk mode". Pressing the "T" key at startup turns your $2500.00 Mac into a $100.00 firewire disk enclosure.

Dollars signs aside, I can assure you that FireWire disk mode is quite gratifying to watch when you've done something stupid to your machine and rendered it unbootable.

I don't know if the same thing is possible with USB and PCs, but I know that trying to recover Windows 2000 by using a FireWire disk enclosure is impossible, and I assume this holds true for XP as well.

RAM issue not a disk issue...

[Duncan3]

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 ;)

Re:About time...

[Frogbert]

This guy isn't a troll. This is an old joke that was thrown around Mac newsgroups, as far as I know it was a real post originally.

don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac
fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (
a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts
to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another
folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which
by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same
operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And
everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to
keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've
encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there
have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has
run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip
architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz
machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people
can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some
intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other
faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Here is a slashdot counterpart:

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you
Slashdot fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front
of a Slashdot screen for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy
a 17 line troll from one message thread on the hard drive to another
thread. 20 minutes. At home, on my Kur05hin account, which by all
standards should be a lot slower than this Slashdot, the same operation
would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this troll transfer, Netscape will not work. And
everything else has ground to a halt. Even fuckedcompany.net is
straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've
encountered while working on various Slashdots, but suffice it to say
there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a
Slashdot that has run faster than its Kuro5hin
counterpart, despite the Slashdot's faster troll architecture. my.yahoo.
com with 8 categories of Rueters Top News runs faster than this site at
times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim
that Slashdot is a superior forum.
Slashdot addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some
intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Slashdot over other
faster, cheaper, more stable forums.

Re:Size/Price/Performance - 3.5" always beats 2.5"

[evilviper]

Firewire shoeboxes are usually a bit more expensive than USB2, but I don't know if Apple's USB2 drivers are as fast as their firewire drivers, so check it out if it matters to you.

Uhh, 480Mbps USB2.0 is slower than Firewire-400, period. No matter how wonderful the software/drivers, nothing can change that. Yes, I realize the numbers for USB2 are higher, but they are just marketing numbers, and reality is very different.

SATA HOWTO for mini

[prlawrence]

BACKGROUND
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/art icles/mini/

mini ensconsed in a Centris 660
(Check out the XBench scores table)
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/art icles/mini/dock/

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+Mal e+IDC+2.5%22+IDE+Laptop+Gender+Changer

DETAILS
I don't yet have the money to do this project, or you would have already heard the results. :-( But here is the plan:

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