Advice on new mini

The mini works pretty well for Photography, but there is one thing to consider: the built in HDD is very slow. So scratchdisk access in Photoshop when you are painting or stamping: waiting, waiting, waiting.
The solution: either mount a SSD (a little challenge), or mount 16Gb RAM (anyone can do it) and run a RAM disk script at boot. I use the latter, and it really eases the work for the internal HD.
For your interest: the built in drive is slower than an external FW400 3,5 inch WD Green drive I use for backup (and those are not the fastest 3,5 inch types as well). So I guess if you boot it from a FW800 caviar black, I think it will work very fast too.

You can try with....

1- A external FireWire for storage, for the sake of speed
2-Increasing the RAM available to the mini

if it comes with an internal 5400 rpm don't use it to boot use that drive as your backup. boot with an external drive via thunderbolt or usb3



http://www.macmall.com/p/LaCie-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~9237532~pdp.hhbeafj


this is a great deal.


needs a cable

http://www.amazon.com/Elgato-1-6-Fe...=1350919970&sr=8-2&keywords=thunderbolt+cable

I do image editing with Photoshop as well as other apps. My main Mac is a 2.3GHz i7 Mini with 16GB RAM and the standard 5400RPM drive.

I have my PS scratch disk on a partition of a 7200RPM external drive connected via Firewire 800. It's a 20GB partition that isn't used for anything else; you can create a suitably-sized scratch disk depending on the size of your image files and the kind of editing that you tend to do.

The external drive is faster than using the internal drive (USB 3.0 should be even faster...), you don't have to deal with fragmentation issues from using the internal and you can use other partitions on the external to create a bootable clone (I prefer SuperDuper! over CarbonCopyCloner and now it's a lot less expensive...) and other uses.

I use Aperture and referenced masters, which means my image files are outside the Aperture library in a typical file structure. I keep the image files on the external drive with a second external drive and CrashPlan as backups. If I'm not mistake Lightroom can be used in the same manner.