Mini and Firewire drive

[fsck3r]

I was thinking about purchasing a Firewire or USB 2.0 External drive that was 7200RPMs with an 8MB cache. I want to use that disk as my startup disk and use the internal drive for backups. Is this possible and would I see a good difference in performance?

 

[gallivant]

I suspect that even though firewire's pretty speedy, all told it'd be a noticable step down from using the internal drive as your primary and backing up onto the firewire.

 

[Yvan256]

I was thinking about purchasing a Firewire or USB 2.0 External drive that was 7200RPMs with an 8MB cache. I want to use that disk as my startup disk and use the internal drive for backups. Is this possible and would I see a good difference in performance?

Go with Firewire. USB was never meant to be used for stuff like drives.

Yes, I know that on paper, USB 2.0 is faster than Firewire 400. But in reality, it isn't. And you'll slow your computer down when using USB 2.0 too, unlike Firewire.

As for the speed difference between the Mini's internal HD and an external Firewire 7200 RPM drive, I'd like to know as well. Keep in mind that some Mac mini's have a 4200 RPM drive while others have a 5400 RPM (and I still don't know if the 5400 is for 40GB and/or 80GB drives only).

 

[AliensAreFuzzy]

I notice a significant increase in speed when using my external firewire 7200RPM drive over my internal 5400

 

[fsck3r]

Yeah? I think I am going to go with the firewire drive and see how it works out, either that or Im going to look for some memory for it I currently have 512 and would like to go to 1 gig. If I check it in with the boss first (wife)

 

[tobio]

definitely get a firewire drive, not a USB2 one... you can boot from firewire and not USB.

 

[mymemory]

If you want to have a good back up connect you firewire drive, then when formating the drives using disc utilities create a ride format using the mirrow option. That way you will have just one drive ico in your desktop but what ever you are doing is going to clone to your external drive as well. In that case if you loose one you will have an exact copy of everything in the other drive.

Now, if you want to have the external drive as it is just run everything from your internal drive and keep files in the external. That is what I do, video files are outside and pictures, softwares and music inside.