Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

sodamnregistered2 · May 17, 2005, 06:54 PM

I sold my dual G5/2GHz to a friend. I was now Macless.

On Tiger release day, I went to my local Apple store and got a mini. At first I sent the guy off to get a 1.25GHz model. At the last instant... I was like... grab the 1.42 please. He returns with the Mini and I got 10% off since I had a card thingee from the Tiger party.

I was going to get the 1.25GHz and 512MB ram in an effort to keep the Mini cheap. Oh well, now I was in possession of a 1.42GHz Mini and 1GB of ram.

I use the Mini for a couple of weeks. Sometimes it was surprising. I was able to do some 3d work in Cinema 4d XL 7 with no real problems. But overall, it was lacking something. The hard drive was indeed a little sluggish, my mouse even would freeze from time to time as it waited to spool up and get going. After my dual G5, this was a little irksome, but I am determined to make a go of it.

Last night I got the wild idea to swap the 7200rpm 60GB drive from my Dell laptop into my mini. Not a hard swap, not an easy swap, but after an initial problem getting my mini to recognize my PC formatted drive (I had to install OS X to an external HD, then boot to it and then I could format the PC HD) things were running smoothly again.

Here's my mini review in a nutshell:

1. Stock HD and 512MB ram ONLY if you are gonna web surf, send e-mail and maybe crop the occassional digi pic.

2. 7200rpm and 1GB ram if you open any of these programs: Dreamweaver MX 2004, Flash MX 2004, Photoshop, After Effects or Illustrator.

I already had the 7200rpm HD from my Dell and a 21" Sony CRT, so... the new iMac makes total sense if you do not have a monitor. The iMac would have a SATA drive, hold more ram, has a better video card and a G5 chip at 1.8 or 2Ghz.

The 7200rpm really does transform the Mini. The mouse stall is gone, and the computer is overall more responsive always.

I'd rate the 7200rpm as important as the 1GB of ram as far as transforming the Mini into a can-do machine.

UberWeenie · May 17, 2005, 08:21 PM

An alternative method to get a very good performance increase is to add a Firewire drive and make it the system disk. I don't know if it is slower or faster than swapping out the internal drive but it zips along very well.

nickw311 · May 17, 2005, 08:26 PM

I am pretty sure that a 7200 RPM Firewire Harddrive is slower than an internal 5400 RPM drive. This has been discussed a few times already.

CaptainHaddock · May 18, 2005, 03:58 AM

I could be wrong, but I think a 5400 RPM drive transfers data at 250-300 Mb/sec, while a Firewire 400 drive gets you 400 Mb/sec. Firewire 800 is even faster (in fact, the hard disk inside the firewire unit is always the bottleneck), but Minis don't get Firewire 800 yet.

But for purity of aesthetics and desk space, getting an internal 7200 drive is still nicer.

nickw311 · May 18, 2005, 06:23 AM

Originally Posted by CaptainHaddock

I could be wrong, but I think a 5400 RPM drive transfers data at 250-300 Mb/sec, while a Firewire 400 drive gets you 400 Mb/sec. Firewire 800 is even faster (in fact, the hard disk inside the firewire unit is always the bottleneck), but Minis don't get Firewire 800 yet.

But for purity of aesthetics and desk space, getting an internal 7200 drive is still nicer.

Taken from this post talking about if firewire drives are faster than internal drives:

Would it be quicker to load the OS onto that miniMate and run it over Firewire since the HDD in there is 7200RPMs?

Depends on the bridge chip, but it's unlikely. For the Firewire HD I have, the seek time is fairly high because of the built-in latency in the bridge chip. That is a very old Oxford Semi 9 chip, not the newer 911 or 922 chips, so YMMV, but I doubt that it will be faster.

andrewgf · May 18, 2005, 06:26 AM

I've tried both an external firewire box with a 7200RPM 8Mb cache drive and a Samsung 60Gb 8Mb cache 5400PM notebook drive internally.

Its a touch slower on the notebook drive. But its dead quiet, cooler and is aesthetically cleaner.

Most definitely drive speed makes a big difference. I'm only running on 512Mb of RAM and its hugely noticeable.

I may transfer the users to the external drive and get the best of both worlds.

lagarto · May 18, 2005, 08:29 AM

Originally Posted by andrewgf

I may transfer the users to the external drive and get the best of both worlds.

If you mean moving the user homes to the external drive, that might not help much. You really want to boot off it, especially if you are low on memory.

OS X is Unix and paging (of the contents of memory to and from disk) is intrinsic to the way it operates. You are better off installing the operating system on the external drive, although you should be able to configure the page file on it. Unless external Firewire is slower than the supplied internal drive.

I'm very curious to know how people get on running off external drives, although I've done the 7k60 upgrade before. Originally I would have gone for a 20" iMac G5 which is now looking very attractive. But I bought a Dell 2005 FPW monitor so I could share it with my work laptop (Win XP). So I need a headless Mac and the mini looks good. Ideally I want to bump the memory to 1 GB and go for DVD-R because it's a cost effective extra, then use an external Firewire/USB 2 drive to boot off. This way I end up with a more modular system.

At the moment I have an iBook G3 800, and run Java apps like Eclipse and JBoss as well as some Photoshop and iMovie. It's starting to feel sluggish...

jmatero · 09:25 AM

This should answer all of your questions..... Until the Hitachi 100GB 7200 is readily available, firewire sounds like a good solution

http://www.budget-ha.com/apple/mac-mini-firewire/

... and.....

http://www.barefeats.com/mini01c.html

andrewgf · May 18, 2005, 10:00 AM

The external 3 1/2" firewire box is a very good way to go. Fast, cheap and plenty of storage.

Lived with it for 3 weeks. Just a little slow waking up from sleep. I could also hear the disk rattling away every so often but not that much of a bother.

Definitely the way to go if you didn't want the hassle of cracking the case open. I swapped back to a fast internal disk out of interest. Also the number of cables and power packs was choking my desk space.

I used the old disk as portable storage in another enclosure.

Barefeats has quite a comprehensive test of internal and external firewire setups as well.

jmatero · May 18, 2005, 10:15 AM

Or how about this.....

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/am...articles/mini/

SmileyDude · May 18, 2005, 11:17 PM

besides the questionable speed of ATA drives connected via Firewire (my personal experience with a Maxtor hasn't exactly been good), there the issue of some Firewire bridge chip vendors taking shortcuts with implementing the ATA command set. For more details, see http://lists.apple.com/archives/darw.../msg00072.html .

Until I can be absolutely certain, I will not trust any Firewire hard drive enough to be my boot drive. That also goes for USB 2 drives, since I can't imagine the situation being any better with them as well.

And before anybody jumps in saying that I'm overreacting, I will say that I have lost more data on Firewire drives than on any other hard drive. And yes, I always make certain that I Eject/Unmount them. And these are name brand drives -- not cheap no-name cases with bad drives.

Besides, who wants to have a sleek computer like the mini with a big ugly external hard drive sitting next to it?

hudson1 · May 19, 2005, 08:50 AM

This whole issue will eventually cause the bloom to fall off the mini rose, if it isn't starting already. Apple pretty much came right out and declared that the mini was intented to be low-priced and aimed at buyers who would normally gravitate straight to a low-priced PC. However, there's nothing low-cost about notebook components, which the mini uses, compared to desktop components. There's also performance that's sacrificed when going to notebook components. So in the end, Apple could have made a somewhat bigger mini (yet still unique) while achieving lower cost and higher performance. Wouldn't that have made the overall offering more attractive to more potential buyers?

druber · May 19, 2005, 09:07 AM

Perhaps, but that greatly depends on our assessment of potential buyers. Are the majority of customers who walk into an Apple Store going to ask about the speed of a hard drive, or how fast the included Firewire port can transfer data? I was in a cell phone store the other day and watched a lady in her mid-50s walk in and say, when asked if she needed help, "I need to see about getting a cell phone".

Trusting a salesman to help you find a machine that meets your needs (and doesn't wildly exceed them) sounds like bad news, but I think the majority of buyers don't have the time or interest to research computers, discover all these little details that we think are vital. And they are vital, to performance. To everyday computing...? Well people were laying out books on Mac SEs back in the day. It took forever, but it worked. Our expectations are high and hard to meet, especially for the prices we hope for.

I'm still waiting for a small G5 that can play back HD. I agree, a mega-Mini would be easier to fit for parts, cooling, etc. That's evidently not Apple's main target, but I'd be pleased if they put out a new machine that was.

hudson1 · 09:48 AM

Oh, I agree with your point about the average shopper. Still, a form-factor using desktop components would have helped with either Apple's margin or lowering the price. I doubt that increasing the overall size by a signficant but still relatively small amount (compared to about anyting in the PC world) would have turned off any potential buyers. The bonus would have been for the non-average shopper like you or me--better performance from a faster drive alone.

druber · May 19, 2005, 04:03 PM

True, true, but double the height of the Mini and you've got something a whole lot closer to the Cube, which I'm sure Apple is fighting to avoid. Sure the CD drive loads differently, sure the case looks different. But that's not a comparison Apple doesn't want people to make. Plus, if Apple had released a machine the size of other Mini-ITX boxes, I bet we would have heard a resounding Meh from the tech world. Apple hates to do things half-way, even when they bomb.

sodamnregistered2 · May 19, 2005, 04:21 PM

I made a post similar to this.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...ht=musing+mini

After owning the mini for a few weeks I agree. They muffed the design goals.

A SATA drive would be cheaper, faster, and larger.

The video card is just completely wrong.

Before I swapped the 7200rpm drive in there... I was not that happy with the mini. It's cool and all, but, it was starting to frustrate me a little.

It's a different computer after the 7200rpm HD swap.