[roybfr]

I have a 1.42 w/ the 80gig drive which is probably the only thing on the Mini I don't like. I have had a hard time deciding whether the extra speed is worth the sacrafice of 20gigs. Have those that swapped out the slower drive for the 60gig hitachi 7200 been happy with the speed increase and felt that it was worth it or am I better just getting a 7200 external drive and be done with it. My mini is mostly a test Apache server running MySQL, Perl and PHP stuff, I will also do some DW and Flash work on it.

[jon l. dawson]

As others and I can confirm, a firewire drive is not that much faster than the stock 4200rpm internal drive, so it's a question you have to answer really of what is more important, storage or speed. I need the storage, so I got a 200gb firewire drive for my home directory, iTunes library and videos. I'm also doing audio production but I think that what I have will be sufficient for it- the disk speed will probably not be the bottleneck.

If I were doing something where disk speed were more important though, I guess with large files as with video processing and such, I'd probably want both a faster internal drive, where I'd do the work, and external drive to store everything else.

With what you're doing, I think you're fine sticking with what you have and optionally getting a firewire drive, especially if you are happy with its performance when booting up, loading applications and so on, which I guess getting a faster drive would improve somewhat.

[andreas_g4]

I'd also like to upgrade the internal hd of my mini to a 7k2 rpm drive, but I think I'm going to wait until I can get a 80 or 100 GB 2,5" HD for a decent price. I guess this will approximately be in a year or so, what is ok since I'd like to keep this mini for a while and then it might be the right time for such an upgrade.

[b11051973]

I also want to wait for an 80 or 100 gig 7200 rpm drive before I do the install. With that and the 1 gig of ram I've got, I'll have the fastest mini of all.

[iREZ]

What about all the overclocked minis out there?

[typoon]

I forget who but there is a company out there offering Mac Mini 100GB Drive upgrades as well as Superdrive upgrades.

[joe]

Originally posted by roybfr:
...Have those that swapped out the slower drive for the 60gig hitachi 7200 been happy with the speed increase and felt that it was worth it or am I better just getting a 7200 external drive and be done with it.

OWC posted some Mac mini benchmarks with 5400rpm and 7200rpm internal hard drive upgrades recently. Sorry I don't have the direct link. From memory, the Hitachi 7200rpm hard drive was the fastest overall (being the only 7200rpm 2.5" drive currently available). However, the suprising part is how much of a boost the 5400rpm drives had over the stock 4200rpm drive. By comparison the 7200rpm Hitachi gave only a modest improvement..........joe

[DISenchanted]

I have the Fastest Mac Mini of all (at least for now). Full Xbench score of 139.

DISenchanted