I bought a used Mac mini a couple weeks ago and the hard drive failed. I hooked up a external firewire drive and now use that as the boot drive. It works great but I should I replace the failed drive or just leave it alone. Is the internal drive normally much faster than an external firewire drive?
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Should I replace the internal drive in my mini?
- Thread starter seattle
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The internal drive will be faster in most respects than any fw drive. However, you can get a lot more capacity on an fw than the internal. Choice is yours.
I just swapped out the 80GB drive that my Mini came with for a 7200rpm 200GB drive I got from OWC. The process is not difficult and took me ~15 minutes for the drive swap and ~1 1/2 hours for Carbon Copy Cloner to do it's thing.
From my experience, booting and running from an internal drive is much quicker.
From my experience, booting and running from an internal drive is much quicker.
I just ordered a 120GB from OWC since they had it on sale for $39.75. Thanks again for the help.
Is yours a G4 Mini or an Intel Mini? Their internal interfaces are different, I think (G4-PATA; Intel-SATA).