[kenfused]

I've been disappointed with the speed of my "new" Mac Mini 1.83 Core Duo (only 512MB ram-- upgrading to 2GB tomorrow)

Would it be faster if I boot off an external 7200 RPM Firewire disk vs. the stock 80GB (95% full) 5400 RPM internal HD?

[adamfishercox]

I think the external factor might negate any speed gains from the 7200 RPM.

[Simon]

If it's decent the external drive will likely be faster.

Regardless, your issues are not enough RAM and HD space (rule of thumb: you should have about 10 GB of free space left on that disk). Get 2 GB of memory in there and make some room on your disk. That should help a lot.

That said, don't expect stellar performance from the mini. There's a reason it's the cheapest Mac.

[adamfishercox]

I know this is off topic, but Simon, what on earth do you do with all your Macs? I mean, you have 3 "new" Macs, and 6 other usable "modern" Macs. Do you use them all?

[Simon]

The new ones, yes. The old ones are my little Mac museum. Most of them are still in perfect working condition.

[adamfishercox]

Cool. I love booting up my little Mac Plus every so often . I'd love to have that many old Macs if I had room.

Anyway... back to the topic...

[mduell]

A small, low speed, almost full drive is just about the slowest hard drive I can think of. The latency and bandwidth bottleneck that FW400 adds isn't slow enough to get a faster, larger drive down to the speeds of your current internal.

[P]

If you're opening up the machine anyway, you could replace the HD with a 7200 rpm 2.5" HD to have the best of both worlds. You're still going to be starved for space though, so a bigger external drive is probably the way to go. Just moving stuff off the internal to the external will help with the speed.

[chris v]

Take advantage of both -- boot from the internal drive, and store your applications on it, but use an external for all your files, and as a scratch disk. And yes, if you can afford to replace the internal with a 7200 rpm also, that'll speed things up a little bit as well.

I think booting from an external, the FW 400 is going to be your bottleneck, and won't gain you anything, based on my experience with a Powerbook 5400 internal & 7200 external.

And the RAM will help a lot, too.

[pooka]

Isn't there a hack floating around the net to add an external sata drive? Seemed easy enough and would probably be the fastest option available.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by pooka 

Isn't there a hack floating around the net to add an external sata drive? Seemed easy enough and would probably be the fastest option available.

It is a hack. Mac Mini eSata Hard Disk

[Waragainstsleep]

Dude, why would you need 3 almost identical MBPs? Thats just madness.
I fully understand the museum, but I would sell the two older MBPs, spec up the new one to the max, maybe get an iMac to replace one of them. Desktops are a different issue, I fully understand having one in every room if you can afford it, but I hate having multiple laptops. Only reason I have two is becasue I only just finished building one of them. Plus mine are quite difference. The older PB has the screen size and backlit keboard for the dark, MacBook has more horsepower and better battery life. Plus the camera, and Windows. Much better to have all my portable stuff in one place. I forget which files are on which machine as it is......

[mfbernstein]

When I had a mini (1.66GHZ Core Duo), I tested a couple of options. FireWire was faster than USB, but neither was reliably faster than the internal 60GB 5400RPM drive (external drive was a 7200RPM 3.5" Maxtor SATA drive). Even with the SATA hack though, disk I/O is often the bottleneck. Best off figuring out exactly which tasks are currently 'slow' to your taste, and having a gander at the Activity Monitor and whatnot to see where the hangups are.

[Kar98]

Originally Posted by adamfishercox 

I think the external factor might negate any speed gains from the 7200 RPM.

You think wrong though.

External 7,200rpm fw400 320 GB drive here vs internal 5,400 SATA 80GB = much faster running everything from the external drive.