Make Mini HD External?

[Toucansma]

Hi,

About to get a new Mini. Have a quick question. I plan to swap out the HD with an SSD (I have a 256gb one), and put the old HD in an external case. What I am wondering is , unlike an SSD, will the HD really truly ever be bottle necked by a USB 3 enclosure (I am pretty sure a USB 2 would bottle neck it)?

Thanks,

Sam

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Depending on the enclosure, no, the HDD will not be bottlenecked, as the probably only offers around 80 to 90 MB/s sequential read and write speeds, maybe a bit more, depending on the HDD model. But USB 3.0 offers much faster speeds than that, but some enclosures have proven to be not that fast.
USB 2.0 offers around 37 MB/s for sequential read and write access.

 

[Toucansma]

Depending on the enclosure, no, the HDD will not be bottlenecked, as the probably only offers around 80 to 90 MB/s sequential read and write speeds, maybe a bit more, depending on the HDD model. But USB 3.0 offers much faster speeds than that, but some enclosures have proven to be not that fast.
USB 2.0 offers around 37 MB/s for sequential read and write access.

Thanks!

 

[August West]

I did just what you are thinking about and don't have any complaints with the setup. But I used an old 5400 rpm Toshiba drive I had laying around and put it in a Mediasonic USB 3.0 enclosure. BM speed disk reports it at about 70 MB/s both read/write which I would guess is about the max the drive is capable since it was never a speedy drive even when new. Since I just use the drive as storage for .flac/.shn music files + photos it works fine and frees up a lot of space on my SSD. I've actually been quite pleased with the ease of setup and performance.

 

[Fishrrman]

An alternative:

If you don't want to go through the trouble of opening the Mini and swapping drives, you can pick up either a USB3 external enclosure, OR a USB3/SATA "docking station", put the SSD into either, and use that as your "external booter".

You will get read speeds that all-but equal that of a drive on the internal SATA bus, and write speeds that will be slightly slower (but still VERY fast).

Saves having to fool with the insides of the Mini -- number of stories here on MR from folks who have opened it up thinking they could do the job, and then ran into trouble as they went along.

 

[warvanov]

Hi,

About to get a new Mini. Have a quick question. I plan to swap out the HD with an SSD (I have a 256gb one), and put the old HD in an external case. What I am wondering is , unlike an SSD, will the HD really truly ever be bottle necked by a USB 3 enclosure (I am pretty sure a USB 2 would bottle neck it)?

Thanks,

Sam

You might be able to leave the current drive in place and install a second internal drive in your Mac mini.