External hard disc for Mac Mini, help please! =)

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trevornetworktrevornetwork
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
My new Mac Mini's disk speed leaves much to be desired. I have considered replacing the internal disc, but will not be doing that due to warrenty purposes. I am looking for suggestions on external discs for the Mini. I have been looking at the WD Raptor 72GB, 10000rpm discs as of late. The Mini only has Firewire 400 unfortunately.



Can I easily boot from a Firewire disc?



Will I see a substantial speed difference going the external drive route?



Which Firewire enclosure should I use?



For speed, should I get a 72GB Raptor, or some huge 7200 RPM drive? (Aureal density vs. rotational speed)

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    dave k.dave k. Posts: 1,306member
    Buy this:



    http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10476



    Dave
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  • Reply 2 of 4
    bentonbenton Posts: 161member
    Remember OtherWorldComputing supports MacAddict, Macworld and Machome magazines with multi page layouts every month.

    Who are we going to support?



    http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer.../FWU2MS500GB8/
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  • Reply 3 of 4
    gm7cadd9gm7cadd9 Posts: 68member
    Buying an external hard drive is a great move on the mini...but you should treat it as an additional drive. It really depends on what you are doing that the internal drive is too slow to handle.



    In the audio world for instance we almost always use a second drive, external or internal. BUT we still use the internal drive to run the system. I would suggest for video or audio that you keep using the internal drive, and not worry about booting off of a firewire drive (though it can be done) this way you have a dedicated hard drive to run the system and a dedicated drive for any media you are running.



    -Roy
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  • Reply 4 of 4
    curiousuburbcuriousuburb Posts: 3,325member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by TrevorNetwork

    My new Mac Mini's disk speed leaves much to be desired. I have considered replacing the internal disc, but will not be doing that due to warrenty purposes. I am looking for suggestions on external discs for the Mini. I have been looking at the WD Raptor 72GB, 10000rpm discs as of late. The Mini only has Firewire 400 unfortunately.



    Can I easily boot from a Firewire disc?



    Yes. Holding down the OPTION key immediately after hearing the POST chime will give you the OF startup device picker... a blue screen with icons for the available bootable devices... might take a second to scan your drive to see if you have OS 9 as well as OS X installed... click the device you want to boot from and hit Return and you're booting from external.



    CMD Option Shift Delete as a key combo after the chime will reset the system startup picker to your internal drive.



    T will start you in FireWire Target mode



    C will boot from your CD drive



    X forces a boot in OS X (if you're stuck in OS 9 after a game, for example).



    more startup key combos can be found here and via google
    Quote:



    Will I see a substantial speed difference going the external drive route?



    Faster than the 5400rpm drive 2MB cache on a 40g mini and faster than the 4200rpm 8MB cache drive on an 80g mini, but not as fast as if you were on a G5 machine with it's significantly faster FSB... the G4 machines still have some data bottleneck issues in the FSB.



    grains of salt suggested, but Barefeats ran some tests. YMMV.
    Quote:



    Which Firewire enclosure should I use?



    FW 400 vs FW 800 isn't really the issue... and the 800 is overkill unless you're grabbing tons of video on a G5. The only things you'll want to look for are: a 6 pin FW plug (which can draw power from the Mac) vs a 4 pin (which requires an external power supply); and that your enclosure supports the more recent FW chipset... IIRC, at least the Oxford 911+ or better (though somebody with more IC juju can clarify on the chipset differences)
    Quote:



    For speed, should I get a 72GB Raptor, or some huge 7200 RPM drive? (Aureal density vs. rotational speed)



    again, unless you're grabbing tons of time critical video, the 10k drive is probably overkill... I'd go for a >250GB 7200 with at least 8MB cache if you can... that way you could partition it to have full internal drive backup, (as a bootable 'emergency disk with utilities' for days you didn't bring your OS dvd), and a few media partitions that you could wipe per project as required. (files under 20MB are defragged on the fly in OS X, but if you're doing massive video work, performance will improve in contiguous volumes versus cluttered drives with files over 20MB which could benefit from defrag periodically, and you generally don't want to wipe your internal to clean up project space if you've got an external which will do the job... )



    HTH
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