Mac Mini Upgrade question

They both make you happy, they both make you really, really poor, and you get annoyed when either are taken away from you. Yep, just like drugs.

andy.

 

The 5400rpm harddrive in my PowerBook certainly seems to make a difference over the 4200 stock drive. Personally I'm waiting for the 7200rpm 100Gb drives to be available in the UK. Just remember you need laptop drives to upgrade the internal drive in a Mini. You might be better with a FireWire drive?

 

I'd totally agree with Robbieduncan about the Firewire drive. If you *really* want to see an increase in performance with the mini, grab a 3.5" firewire enclosure, stick any modern 7200 rpm 3.5" desktop hard drive inside, and boot off of that instead. If you're concerned about aesthetics, just get a fairly long firewire cable and tuck the external drive out of sight. That's a cheaper solution with better performance than any other laptop drive you could stick in there. Plus, if you set up the partitions right, you can then use the internal laptop drive as a full bootable backup clone of what's in your external drive, so that at any time you could unplug the external drive and just run off of the internal. Lots of benefits to running this way.

The drawback is having something else plugged into the back of your mini, and perhaps noise if you're a noise freak like me. Desktop drives tend to make more noise than notebook drives (though the samsung and seagate drives are very quiet), and that can take away from one of the main advantages of having the mini in the first place.

Also, if you're going to upgrade the internal drive, you might as well drop the 20-30 bucks on a FW enclosure for it. These are easy to use, and when you're done installing the new drive, you can throw a base install of panther/tiger on it, and then use the other drive to pull the settings over. I've done this about 4 times last week as I've been moving from mini to laptop to laptop, and it's one of the HUGE superiorities of os x over windows. Migrating my complete machine from a mini to a powerbook took a total of about two clicks of a mouse and plugging in a cable, and it all just works! I've never, never been able to do that with windows, and doing it with linux is a lot more hands on as well. You'll save yourself a lot of time. And then the external drive can, once again, be a backup drive for a bootable clone of your current OS or just a place for extra storage.

Here's the macally notebook enclosure I've got. It works great. I picked it up from newegg.

macally notebook FW enclosure

good luck.

 

Go for a faster internal HD (7,200rpm). There should be a nice boost in performance (depends on what you are doing). Or go for a nice external HD- its your call.

 

Some time ago there was a post with a link to a nice video showing how to upgrade the drives in a mini - I think it might be on this page:
http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/index.cfm?page=Video/directory.html

 

Try http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=366

 

the best external HD for the Mini

get this: http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp

 

Firewire is a buss, so you can chain whatever you like off that port.

Of course, there will eventually be a speed penalty if you are trying to do several datastreams simultaneously on the same Firewire buss; however there is no solution to that on the Mini so don't worry about it too much.

 

I have my Mini with a hard drive connected via Firewire and another hard drive connected to that drive and then I have connected my camera to the second hard drive and have had no problems capturing (or doing a video conference in iChat) with that set up.

 

Now that sound very interesting. How does one go about doing that?

 

Seriously. How do you do that???

 

You use Disk Utility to partition the external drive so that it has one partition that is the same size as the internal hard drive in your mini. You don't have to do this, but if you try to clone a full 80 GB (or larger) drive over to a 40 GB one... well, you see the point.

You select the external as your startup disk (in System Preferences) and use it as normal, of course remembering never to disconnect or switch off the external.

When you want to make the clone you can use CarbonCopyCloner (donationware, but do read the developer's website to understand the workarounds necessary to clone succesfully under 10.4 Tiger. The Spotlight app has made cloning a slightly more time-consuming job, but still very, very worthwhile), or the shareware SuperDuper!

If you want to then boot from the internal you either select it in System Prefs or hold the option key at bootup and select it there. The latter way is handy because it is only changes the bootup drive once, meaning next time you reboot it will be from the drive you selected in System Prefs.

That all make sense mate? Ask away if anything is unclear.