Aloha All,
The mini is a great little machine. I had gotten it to edit FCP because I couldn't afford the g5. I had gotten the mini when the 1.42 first came out.
I upgraded the drive to a superdrive and the ram. Next thing I did was the internal HD. All they had at the time in 7200 rpm drives was a 60 gb deskstar. Still had some minor issues with dropping frames so what i did was add heat sinks to the ram and to aid in the cooling added 1.5 inch spacers at all 4 corners so that elevated the mini and facilitated more air flow.
I added the Matrox Dual Head 2 go with the Switch Res X drivers and I have a full edit suite with 2 17 inch lcd monitors, a digital deck and a huge 24 inch ntsc monitor. You couldn't tell that all of that was being run off of my mini.
The reason for the speed is the internal drive running @ 7200 and ONLY has all of the programs and all storage data is on externals. I have a TB of external storage. Because the internal and external drives all run at 7200 that adds to the efficency. It would be a lot worst if you have a 5400 drive speaking to 7200 drives. My friend got so frustrated with his mini he doesn't use his anymore. All of the video clips at our website can be seen at
http://punishum.com Every clip you see was edited on my mac mini edit suite.
The 7200 rpm internal drive alone makes a HUGE difference. I have a 1.67 Powerbook with 2 gbs of RAM with the stock 5400 internal drive. My mini starts up "WAY" faster than my powerbook. My tech who specializes in MACs said it is due to the internal drive speeds at 7200 is the reason.
So who ever says that a mini can't do a lot, hasn't tried to do a lot with it.
Mahalo,
http://punishum.com