Registered: 10/16/04
Posts: 586
Loc: Vancouver, BC Canada
I recently bought one of the new Core2Duo mini's and even though in many ways its a total screamer I find the HD access speeds bog things down often enough to be a drag on my user experience. Plus the stock 80GB won't be enough looking forward.
My options are either upgrade the internal 2.5" (Hitachi 80GB 5400rpm 8mb) to a Seagate 7200rpm 2.5" 160GB 8MB buffer I can buy a a local shop - OR - buy a http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministackv3 FW drive from OWC. I would think that an internal SATA 7200rpm even though a 2.5" would be faster than a FW drive in some ways.
Thoughts?
Edited by (09/30/0703:36 PM)
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Mac mini C2D 1.83GHz - 2GB RAM - 200GB 7200rpm HD Sawtooth w/G4 1GHz - 1GB RAM - SIIG SATA w/2x1TB HD B&W w/G4 600MHz - 1GB RAM - 2x80GB HD Sawtooth G4 400MHz - 512MB RAM - 40GB HD Dell Ultrasharp 2007WFP 20" Widescreen LCD 2.94TB Total Storage
Registered: 06/07/04
Posts: 1266
Loc: Stoughton, WI USA
Well, it's not like the original mini. Your best performance upgrade would be sticking a faster internal drive in your machine. I'd go that route for sure.
Also, try having a boot partition thats journaled and a secondary "Home" partition non-journaled. See if you get the freaky speed boost that I got on my MacBook. You may be happy with what you have and end up getting the ministack.
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MacBook 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 2GB DDR2 RAM & 120GB SATA 5400RPM HDD Canon Rebel XTI Google Cr-48 Beta Laptop
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>Mac mini PPC / 1.42 Ghz / 1GB RAM / 74.41GB 4200rpm 2.5" / Airport + Bluetooth / 10.4.7 / 20.1" LG widescreen >G4 400 PPC / 20 gig / 768MB RAM / ZIP drive / 10.4.7 /17" apple SD / Back up system >Powerbook Titanium 1Ghz / 40GB / 512MB RAM / mashed up and waiting for a good mod! >Macintosh SE/30
Registered: 10/16/04
Posts: 586
Loc: Vancouver, BC Canada
Also the PowerPC mini's used 4200rpm drives and the intel's use 5400
Internal 7200 SATA will give me the best performance in this situation. Some benchmarks I have seen put some 2.5" 7200rpm SATA around 70MB sec. Firewire maxes out at 50MB sec..
Internal for me
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Mac mini C2D 1.83GHz - 2GB RAM - 200GB 7200rpm HD Sawtooth w/G4 1GHz - 1GB RAM - SIIG SATA w/2x1TB HD B&W w/G4 600MHz - 1GB RAM - 2x80GB HD Sawtooth G4 400MHz - 512MB RAM - 40GB HD Dell Ultrasharp 2007WFP 20" Widescreen LCD 2.94TB Total Storage
I just swapped out the 60GB 5400 in my MacBook for a 100GB 7200rpm. Finder is as snappy as any Intel Mac I've used under 10.4.10. Yet to see anything match the dual 2.5 G5 tower (single core) under Panther though. It was as quick as OS 9......