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SATA hard drive in 2010 Mac Mini

M

moniquetx

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 25, 2008
56
1
Dallas, TX
I really like the new aluminum unibody mini but I've been bashing my head for days now to figure out why Apple used a slow Toshiba 5400 RPM SATA hard drive instead of a SATA II.

The Nvidia controller is the same one used in the new MacBook Pro and should support sppeds of up to 3 Gigabit but the hard drive only has a negotiated link speed of 1.5 Gigabit per second.

Do you guys think that replacing with a faster hard drive would speed up the system significantly? Has anybody done it yet?
 
Sensamic

Sensamic

macrumors 68040
Mar 26, 2010
3,006
642
My plan is to install an SSD in the near future, or maybe a 7200rpm drive.
 
N

nicklad

macrumors 6502
Jun 13, 2007
258
3
Nottingham, UK
screenshot20100706at175.png


I've just updated mine with a 7200 rpm WD Scorpio Black 500GB and put 8GB of RAM in the machine. All working fine.
 
L

lostime

macrumors regular
May 19, 2009
166
11
moniquetx said:
I really like the new aluminum unibody mini but I've been bashing my head for days now to figure out why Apple used a slow Toshiba 5400 RPM SATA hard drive instead of a SATA II.

The Nvidia controller is the same one used in the new MacBook Pro and should support sppeds of up to 3 Gigabit but the hard drive only has a negotiated link speed of 1.5 Gigabit per second.

Do you guys think that replacing with a faster hard drive would speed up the system significantly? Has anybody done it yet?
Click to expand...

it doesn't matter what Sata bus it has as long as they're still using spinning laptop hard drives. Even the faster 7200rpm drives only average 70~ish MBps which isn't even close to the 150MBps sata 1 provides. You'd have to use a SSD to outrun the sata 1 bus, or the new Seagate Momentus XT.

putting in a 7200 drive will speed it up a little, taking out the optical drive and Raiding two drives together will speed it up a lot.
 
I

i7QuadCoreMania

macrumors 6502
Nov 10, 2009
282
0
this again? there already was a topic on this a little while ago.

already stated that 5400rpm won't fill the bus, so making it sata II is pointless. I would buy an SSD if you had to have the speed or a momentus XT if you needed something cheaper more space.
 
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