Getting ready to move from PC to Mini

[gwerhart0800]

I originally ordered a Mac Mini for iPhone development tasks, but it turns out that it is actually faster than the Dell E520 (Pentium D 925) that I have been using as my home PC. As such, I decided to "upgrade" my mini a bit and move over to it as my main home machine.

I ordered a 200GB 7200 Seagate drive to replace the 80GB original drive and I already upgraded the Ram to 2GB. The next trick will be to move from the 80GB drive to the 200GB drive. From poking around, I see that Carbon Copy Cloner seems to be the "standard" way of moving stuff from one drive to another. But, I have a few questions:

1. Is there any benefit to reloading the OS from scratch over using CCC to move the current drive contents?

2. I currently have a WinXP Pro VM running under VMWare Fusion. I am strongly tempted to redo that with a bootcamp partition that I can run via VMWare Fusion. From the Bootcamp docs, it looks like they prefer a 32GB partition because it can be set up as FAT32 and accessed read/write from OS X. Do other folks have some advice on what to do with the FS format for the windows partition? I have not used a FAT32 filesystem for a while (except for USB keyfobs) and I don't remember if there are any performance or corruption issues with using it over NTFS.

3. I was cheap and order the base Mini with the non-Superdrive. I currently have a CD+RW/DVD and a DVD-RW on the E520. I was pondering purchasing a n external DVD-RW USB drive to use to get the DVD burning capability back. Is there a common external DVD-RW drive that I should look at? Are there compatibility issues that require limiting the drive to certain brands? Does OS X come with DVD authoring or do I need a Nero type package?

Thanks,

 

[Cave Man]

1. For the same machine, there's probably no need to reinstall the OS.

2. I'm set up with 32 gig FAT partitions as well. Just more convenient for me. Seems that Parallels has virtual disk sharing (really just a folder in your Mac's home folder), but I'm not sure about Fusion (I've only started using it).

3. DVD authoring for supported drives only. Most third-party drives are not supported by OS X's burning, unless you can mod the drive with PatchBurn (see http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ for more info).

 

[gwerhart0800]

3. DVD authoring for supported drives only. Most third-party drives are not supported by OS X's burning, unless you can mod the drive with PatchBurn (see http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ for more info).

Would it be possible to used the Mac Book Air USB Superdrive? It looks like it only costs $99 and that is about 2x the cost of getting a case and a drive separately ... without the compatibility issues.

 

[Cave Man]

I don't know for sure, but I seem to recall some issue with voltage, such that only the MBA can drive that external. Might want to check around for that.

 

[gwerhart0800]

You are right, the external superdrive for the Mac Book Air requires more current than a standard USB port offers. I am now looking at OWC devices, but it would be really cool to find a blue-ray reader/DVD-RW/CD-RW. (The BR writers are way too expensive at the moment.)