[Colin Davis]

I'm thinking of ways to move my office to Mac machines- The Mac mini's look nice machines, but I'm worried about the Hard Drive speed- Are there any benchmarks running them with an external drive?

Also, It's an odd question, but does anyone know if Apple will remove the HD for me, if I ask? I'd rather not boot them to the internal hard drive accidentily. I know I could do it myself, but I don't want to void the warranty.

-Colin

[chefpastry]

I've never seen any benchmarks like that, but I've been running a MacBook on an external Firewire drive for the last week or so while awaiting delivery of my Mac Pro and my conclusion is that it really depends on what you will be doing. I have a tendancy to run a bunch of apps all at the same time and whenever I run out of memory (there's 2GB installed) and OS X starts using virtual memory the machine lags badly...

[iREZ]

the mini has an upgraded hard drive at 5400rpm vs the older mini's 4200rpm drive. sure, apple released a silent upgrade but never publically announced it, so some machines had the faster drives while some still had the slower drives. i have a macbook pro with stock 5400rpm drive and its not that shabby. i think there was a comparrison of internal 5400 vs external 7200 on barefeats somewhere but i cant find it as of yet.