Mac Mini with External Firewire Drive
I’ve been drooling at the dual- or quad-core G5’s for a while now, trying to decide whether or not I want to spend that kind of money on a new computer. I’m really very happy with the Mac Mini; you certainly can’t complain about its price. But I do still have some speed concerns. Specifically, application startup time can be horrendous. Applications which hog a lot of memory (like Firefox) can be unbearable to restart. The current solution has been to never shut anything down. Sometimes switching between applications becomes cumbersome, but never as slow as a fresh startup. Before I traded up to the big Macs, which have way more power than I’ll really need, I want to see if it’s possible to give the Mini just a little more juice.
I’d read the reports back when the Mini came out that the stock internal hard drive (a 2.5” laptop drive) was heinously slow and that an external firewire case with a fast (7200RPM) drive would get you a pretty good increase in disk performance. I saw some of the stats published and kind of took them as amusing anecdotes. I wasn’t totally convinced it would be easy to get better performance out of an external hard drive. It’s very counter-intuitive for me to think that it would, being a guy whose never owned a computer with a laptop hard drive.
Well, I finally got around to trying it out for myself, in the hopes that this will be the speed boost that my Mini will need. I checked Tom’s Hardware for the latest info on external cases. I found that of the 1394a (Firewire400) cases, the NexStar 3.5” External Firewire Drive Enclosure was one of the higher performing ones from the bunch. I blessed it with a Maxtor 120gb drive (7200RPM, 8mb cache) that I was using in an older USB 2.0 case.
The results really speak for themselves. In every test, the external drive is faster than the stock internal drive. In almost every test, the external drive clocks in around twice as fast. The only benchmarking I’ve done so far is with Xbench. I don’t have any real application results yet as I haven’t had a chance to try booting from the external drive. I’ll update when I get back from xmas break and get a chance to play around with it more. So far, I’m excited to see such a good speed increase for such a marginal amount of effort. This should end up being a lot cheaper than a dual-core G5.
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