I can't remember where I read it (possibly here) about someone getting a huge boost in performance by using an external drive for their mini.
Well, my 512mb ram (been putting off the 1gb upgrade) mini was annoying me too much today (I'm tired of the spinning beach ball) so I cleared off one of my 160gb external firewire drives and installed Tiger on it and then migrated my home folder et all to the new drive.
Holy Crap! What a difference. It's amazing the difference in performance. The article I read quoted 75% boost and it sure feels like that much. 4200 rpm vs 7200 rpm really makes a big difference.
Everything works like it should....just pops now instead of being sluggish.
I'm going to leave the basic install on the mini hd but use it for a backup drive for now. Obviously this setup isn't portable but it sure works better now.
Highly recommended if you have access to an external drive.
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Last edited by retrocactus; May 20th, 2005 at 10:43 PM.
REVIEW: Mac mini --
hard drive tests
The Mac mini's weak point is hard drive speed since it uses a 4200rpm 2.5 inch "notebook" drive (either Toshiba or Hitachi). I understand the idea is small size and weight, but a relatively slow drive can contribute to slow overall performance when booting, launching apps, and doing virtual memory operations. Apple could have used a faster drive but it would drive the cost up. They should at least offer alternatives as a CTO option. Enough editorializing.
We tested the two stock drives. Then we replaced them with both a Hitachi 7K60 7200rpm and Seagate Momentus 5400rpm 100GB drives and ran the same tests. We also tested the same drives in an external FireWire 400 enclosure to see how that compared. Finally, we added a fast 3.5 inch drive in a FireWire 400/800 enclosure.
INSIGHTS
The Mac mini's drive is similar to what you find in an iBook or PowerBook -- 4200rpm with sluggish average seek time and latency. This can make the Mac mini feel more sluggish than the clock speed would imply -- especially if you are running with less than 1GB of memory.
As you can see from the graphs, there are faster alternatives to the factory drives. The Hitachi 7K60 was the fastest alternative internal drive. If you find the 60GB capacity too confining, the Seagate Momentus 5400rpm drive provided much more speed than the stock drives in all except the Photoshop test while providing greater 100GB capacity.
Another way to add speed to your Mac mini without cracking open the case (and risking warranty nullification) is to attach a fast drive to the FireWire 400 port. That's exactly what we tried. Not only did we test the same drives externally as we tried internally, but we added the fast Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB 3.5inch 7200rpm drive to the mix. It added both speed and mucho capacity to the Mac mini system. Too bad the mini doesn't sport a FireWire 800 port. The sustained transfer speed jumped from the mid 30s to the mid 50s when we connected the FireWire 400/800 enclosure with DiamondMax 10 drive to a G4 PowerBook's FW800 port.
Of course, the cost of drive (and memory) upgrades can cause the price of the mini to mushroom. Be sure to do "what if" exercises before you buy the mini to make sure the faster, aggressively priced G5 iMac isn't a better deal for you.
I suspect more of the "speed" was the fresh install. There is marginal actual speed difference between the internal and external drives due to the limitation of the Firewire bus.
If you run Onyx or other "clean up" utilities on a regular basis you will keep your perceived speed up.
If you erase your internal drive and clone back to it you'll see what I mean.
If Apple put a FW800 port in THEN we'd see some serious difference.
How full was the internal???
Also did you happen to update to 10.4.1 at the same time???
UP to 1 gig would be a REAL good thing.
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The speed improvements at the barefeet site are less than what I would have expected. Except for the photoshop test (which I think goes beyond the mini's target market), the improvement is only 10 - 20% for booting and launching an application.
Why wouldn't one see numbers closer to 70% which is the drive speed difference (4200 to 7200)? There must be something else slowing things down.
Because there is more to computing that just reading from the disk
You would see a significant gain in a benchmark that tests JUST disk access, but HDD speed is a component of overall system speed, not the exclusive bottleneck.
The very first post in this thread talk about a 75% boost. I would possibly spend money on that improvement - but for 10 or 20% for certain activities only...I don't think so.
I'm using the mini with the slow 4200 drive now on occasion. apparently some minis were shipped with 5400 drives but I wasn't so lucky.
For normal computing, ie email, internet, word, excel etc., I don't really see any speed issues. In fact we just looked a about 100 pictures in iphoto on the mini, each one 2-3 Meg and they came up instantly, one after the other, faster than I expected.
I suspect more of the "speed" was the fresh install. There is marginal actual speed difference between the internal and external drives due to the limitation of the Firewire bus.
Also did you happen to update to 10.4.1 at the same time???
UP to 1 gig would be a REAL good thing.
While it was a clean install, I migrated everything over from my original upgrade install (apps, plugins, etc) so it really wasn't a clean install.
I did update to 10.4.1 as well which I had done previously. As far as I'm concerned, it was the same install, except on a faster drive.
Benchmarks and other types of figures are great for some people but for me, real world results speak volumes and this definately is a huge difference in performance for me and only took about 1/2 an hour to realize these results.
The 1gb memory upgrade is upcoming but on the back burner a little longer now that I see these significant improvements...that and I've got a new car coming this week
__________________
MacBook Air | 20" Core Duo iMac | PowerMac G5 | 16gb iPhone 3G
The 40GB drive in the Mini is a 5400 RPM drive with a 2MB Cache. The 80GB is a 4200RPM drive but with an 8MB Cache. They performance of the two seems to be pretty close from what I hear.
mac mini hard drive performance upgrade
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