So I'm looking for my 1st Mac and looking into buying either a 20" iMac or a Mac Mini. I mainly do office stuff, internet surfing, itunes, some home movie stuff with iMovie, and some Photoshop. I don’t do any gaming or 3D stuff. I will also be booting into XP and/or using parallels and XP. I’d like the machine to last at least 3-4yrs. Which one would suit my needs the best?
With the iMac, I am debating on either upgrading to a 500GB drive and keeping with 1GB of RAM until I can afford to upgrade the RAM within 6 months or so. Or, Upgrade to 2GB of RAM and keep the 250GB drive for the time being and add some external fire wire drives when I can afford to. With the education discount, both are pretty close in price, but I can only afford to do 1 right now. The 250GB drive would be fine for now, but I'm sure I would fill it up within a year or so since I already have close to 180GB of data. And I’ve heard that upgrading the HD in the Intel iMac is not very easy. That’s why the 500GB drive is appealing.
With the mini setup, I would get the 1.8GHz and 2GB of RAM. Since the largest HD for the mini is 160GB, I was just going to keep the stock 80GB drive and add a pair of external Fire wire drives 300GB or larger. Along with that, I would get a 19” Standard LCD or 20” widescreen LCD. Now a question I have with the mini is, with the older PPC models, the performance could be increased by using a external FW drive as the main drive since they were using ATA laptop drives. With the newer models having laptop SATA drives, will you see a performance increase with using External FW drive as the main drive instead of the SATA drive?
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