FireWire for 75% Better Mac mini Disk Performance

peterdaly writes "As a proud new owner of a Mac mini, I quickly discovered the internal hard drive performance was so pathetic compared to what I was used to that I needed to do something about it ... preferably on the cheap. I ended up trying a FireWire attached storage enclosure and using an older 80GB drive I had in my closet from a dead PC. My mini got about a 75 percent disk performance increase for about $50 (or $100 if you need a drive). Here is a benchmark of before and after as well as information about my research and upgrade. If you already have at least 512MB RAM, this may be the best performance bang for your buck if you're looking for your mini to be faster and more responsive."

And if you want something really cool

[daveschroeder]

Yes, it's true that since the Mac mini uses a 2.5" laptop hard drive by default, which is why the disk performance is relatively poor. This is why you can achieve greater performance with a 3.5" drive coupled with a FireWire enclosure. But many of the FireWire enclosures out there are what I would call, well, damned ugly. And huge. Way more huge than they need to be. And way too ugly and clunky to go with a computer like the Mac mini, unless you bought it completely for price and could care less about appearances.

Enter miniMate: a FireWire 400/USB 2.0 hub with integrated Ultra ATA 3.5" disk bay with up to a 400GB 7200RPM disk, all in an enclosure aesthetically designed exactly like the form factor of the Mac mini (except a bit shorter):

http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp [micronet.com]

Re:And if you want something really cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's true that since the Mac mini uses a 2.5" laptop hard drive by default, which is why the disk performance is relatively poor. This is why you can achieve greater performance with a 3.5" drive coupled with a FireWire enclosure.

snip
The internal drive is slow cause it is a cheap/low end drive. A decent 7200 rpm notebook drive as a replacement will greatly improve the performance of a mini. (And the run cooler) Just upgrade the internal drive (yes, many people have done this) and you dont need an ugly extra external drive or even a pretty one that takes up more space.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[daveschroeder]

Can you buy two of those and run them in RAID-1?

Absolutely.

With Disk Utility, it's just a matter of dragging the disks into a RAID set, and you're done.

I have nothing to do with that product...

[daveschroeder]

...and no vested interest of any kind in anything relating to it, and didn't submit the story.

But thanks for your concern!

Yes

[peterdaly]

Recent Macs boot from a firewire drive just fine.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[itistoday]

*ahem* For those not aware Disk Utility is a free hard disk utility that comes with every mac, and every OS X installation.

Been using a USB 2.0 Drive....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I use a 120 GB Simpletech USB 2.0 drive as my capture/video editing repository and it works smashingly well. One time I forgot about saving the project to the Powerbook drive and was wondering why in heck iMovie HD was dropping frames and discovered I was using the internal drive. The USB 2.0 drive performs WAY better.

ask and you are answered...

[mbaudis]

here (or google...): http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitachi_travelstar6 0GB_7200/travelstar60GB_7200rpm.html [xlr8yourmac.com]

Re:not surprising

[LurkerXXX]

Yes, lots. I've had a 60GB 7200 2.5" laptop drive for a few years now. Hitachi just came out with a 7200 RPM 100 GB drive.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[rossifer]

7200rpm notebook drive [ebay.com]

Regards,
Ross

Re:Question

[sankyuu]

The process (from TFA):

1. Install the IDE drive into the FireWire Enclosure. In addition to opening the enclosure and putting it back together, this will probably involve plugging in two cables (power and IDE) into the drive and possibly (depending on the design) screwing in 4 screws.

2. Plug the enclosure into the Mac Mini using a FireWire cable and power.

3. Format/Erase the drive using Apple's Disk Utility...OSX may prompt you depending on how the drive setup. (You'll lose any data on the drive during this step.)

4. Clone the internal disk to the FireWire Drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC)

5. Change the Startup Disk using the System Preferences Startup Disk control panel

6. Reboot

7. Make sure everything went well, do some testing to make sure everything is working and all your data is on the new drive.

8. Erase your internal drive to avoid confusion of duplicate files.

Either that, or he's just trying get you to mix up the steps and erase both your drives. ;)

Re:Yes

[Shanep]

Recent Macs boot from a firewire drive just fine.

Just make sure the firewire enclosure you use will boot fine from a mini. I purchased a Zynet Firewire/USB2 combo enclosure so that I could boot from an external seperate drive for testing (Mac OS X on external, various other OSes on internal), while allowing protection of my OS X stuff by unplugging it. The mini just gives me a grey screen with no Apple logo when I try to boot from the firewire drive.

I've not seen much complaint of this with firewire drives, so I assume this is due to the cheap Zynet.

this is not NEW news. check bareFeats.com

[henk]

from Feb 4th 2005
REVIEW: Mac mini -- internal and external hard drive tests

http://www.barefeats.com/mini01c.html [barefeats.com]

good analysis w/ lotsa pretty graphs

Recent Macs only? Not

[sjonke]

I don't consider my clamshell iBook G3 333 or my PowerMac G4 Dual-533, or my iMac G3 400 MHz to be recent. All of them boot from firewire. Indeed the only firewire Mac that doesn't boot from firewire is the very first one: the blue & white PowerMac G3 tower. If you're looking for a Mac on the cheap, my advice is that you take a pass on any Blue & White - it isn't worth any price IMHO, and not just due to the non-booting firewire.

Re:not surprising

[Janitor]

Hitachi makes a 7200RPM 2.5" IDE drive:
Hitachi 60GB TravelStar 7K60 7200RPM 8MB Cache.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[s100w]

Works great once it's set up and you don't change things. Sometimes my Firewire RAID array wouldn't show up correctly if OS X detected the drives in a different order.

And maybe this is obvious, but I couldn't find a way to move to OS X software RAID over to a Linux box without reformatting the drives.

Re:The Real Crime...

[EggyToast]

3 things:
Laptop resolution -- Apple has stated that the reason their laptops remain at the resolution they do is so that they maintain a 100dpi resolution. So it is intentional. You can disagree with that if you like -- not many people need to run 15" screens at super-high resolutions, as they can often make text difficult to read.

64 bit OSs -- It's more useful for consumers to introduce 64bit code for processes that can use it more effectively than simply dropping everything into it. Why? Mostly so that you can still use the operating system with the benefits of 64bit code without relying on getting all new programs. Most importantly, though, are drivers. Yes, Microsoft has released a 64bit version of Windows. As they release very little hardware on their own, though, you'd be hard pressed to get a system operational and crash-free on 64bit XP -- the drivers simply aren't there, and the ones that are tend to be buggy. Therefore it's smarter at this point to release an OS that can utilize 64bit elements if it finds it and scales back if they're not there, than simply dump a release out there with no real support so people don't go through the trouble of using it. As it is, it's more worthwhile for people with 64bit chips to continue running 32bit XP.

"triple core PPC chip" is in no way analogous to "triple core G4 or G5 chips." PPC is approprately compared to x86, not a specific model, so there's no reason to assume that the Xbox's CPU isn't the x86 equivalent of a 3 core celeron (or worse) at 3.2ghz, built in PPC architecture. Believe me, it's not because IBM suddenly had a breakthrough and could mass-produce triple-core G5s with no heating problems.

Re:The Real Crime...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tiger is not a full 64-bit OS because a full 64-bit OS would be slower and more resource-intensive in every way with no benefit. Let me repeat that, zero benefit. The only reason Windows gets away with it is because the x86-64 architecture includes improvements like additional general purpose registers (bringing the number from 4 to 16, half the number PowerPC has always had), not because 64-bitness really helps everything.

Re:I have to ask, yet again...

[Chucker23N]

"And this may be slightly offtopic, but considering the speeds we can get nowdays with Firewire 800"

The Mac mini neither has FireWire 800, nor any extension means to add that.

"why go with expensive PATA/SATA"

Huh? PATA drives are the cheapest on the market, and SATA are hardly more expensive.

"perhaps an internal firewire drive"

FireWire drives don't exist, and FireWire isn't designed for internal use either. External FireWire enclosures for internal PATA or SATA drives, on the other hand, exist indeed.

Either way, this is moot, as the Mac mini *does* have both FireWire 400 and USB 2, but *doesn't* have FireWire 800, nor any space for 3.5 inch hard drives, nor any space to extend capabilities. It can only host a 2.5 inch drive inside, and all 2.5 inch drives are slower and more expensive than their 3.5 equivalents.

They are also, however, easier on power, quieter, and cooler. And, of course, smaller.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

You can remotely wake up and boot a PC via PXE [webopedia.com] through the network and pull a new image. I'm sure any Mac can as well. I can only imagine the rig jobs you have going in your IT department if think booting and reimaging a PC/Mac from an iPod (or any portable drive for that matter) is a godsend. What were you doing before that was an option?

I don't know if the same thing is possible with USB and PCs
Yes it is and like above, PXE works as well, and the typical standard boot from cd or DVD too. If your image fits, you can have it on the DVD. If you are on a network, boot with a network boot disk, connect to a network share and pull a new image if PXE is not an option. Apple or PC, everyone of those options seems more logical then walking around with a portable drive visting and reimaging machines one by one.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

As a bonus for those of us who want more utility out of our portable boot disks, all FireWire-equipped PowerBooks and any FireWire equipped desktop since some of the later G4s have the ability to boot in what Apple appropriately calles "FireWire disk mode". Pressing the "T" key at startup turns your $2500.00 Mac into a $100.00 firewire disk enclosure.

Any it's not just the hard disk -- the optical drive is shared too, at least on later model system.

I used my PowerBook's DVD drive to install Tiger onto my girlfriend's CD-only iBook. Very handy indeed.

Re:Been using a USB 2.0 Drive....

[binarytoaster]

You might get better performance from a FireWire enclosure.

"Might" isn't really the word you're looking for. "Will definitely", even on a PC - FW400 is still faster than USB2 even though supposedly USB2 is 480Mbit/s because of the way the architecture is designed.

USB is much more CPU-bound than FW because of the master/slave architecture. If you google around a bit you will find that FW beats USB in pretty much every benchmark. You could argue that it just depends on your chipset but the bottom line is that it is far easier to find a firewire chipset that outperforms a USB chipset than vice versa.

Also it's just nice to get a disk that has the ability to be daisy-chained with another disk via another FW port on the back; most LaCie drives do this. And if you're going LaCie and you have a Powerbook you might as well get the FW800 disks especially for video editing...

Re:not surprising

[timeOday]

Hitachi just came out with a 7200 RPM 100 GB drive.

Ahhh, the mythical Momentus 7200.1, 7200rpm 100 Gig laptop drive. Are you saying they're actually shipping? They announced [seagate.com] that sucker almost a year ago. The sad thing is, 100 GB was a lot more impressive last year. Laptop hard drives are really lagging!

Too bad MiniMate is way expensive

[cbreaker]

You can get an EIDE/SATA 400GB drive for about $250 now, and the 400GB version of this thing is $560.

$310 is a lot to pay for a drive enclosure and a port hub, even if it does look like the macMini. By the time you've purchased the mini itself, this thing, and assuming you're using it stand-alone - a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.. you might as well buy a BigMac and get a faster + more expandable system.

Re:I bought the MacMini for the form factor..

[quarkscat]

So sorry -- I don't have a Mac Mini that I can provide some subjective data on. I do, however,
have a Mac Powerbook which I replaced the OEM drive in.

The OEM drive was a Fujitsu 5400 RPM 60 GB disk. I replaced it with a Hitachi 7200 RPM 60 GB disk. The replacement disk has the same/similar power saving features as the OEM, so the PBK firmware and the OS (10.3.9) have good control. I have experienced a noticable improvement in the speed of loading applications, as well as spooling large files to disk. (The Hitachi drive has a far larger onboard cache that helps a lot.) I have lost about 15 minutes worth of battery time when untethered from an AC mains source. Over all, excepting the high cost premium charged for the 7200 RPM drive, my upgrade has been a net plus.

Just my $00.02 worth...

Re:OS X Lousy filesystem performance overall

[Have Blue]

Appletalk is a legacy technology that should only be used to talk to really old Macs and printers. If you can switch everything on your network to Appleshare over TCP, do so as soon as possible.

no effect on heat and battery

[Wabbit Wabbit]

I replaced the stock drive in my 17" RevA powerbook with the 7200rpm 60gb Hitachi.

No change in noise, heat or battery drain.

The performance gain is notcieable and very welcome.

Re:Well...

[hacker]

"If I recall correctly, the drive inside the Mac Mini is a laptop (2.5") drive. Those aren't really known for great performance."

That may be true of the drives Apple is using, but it definately is not true of 2.5" drives. In fact, 2.5" drives are almost always going to be faster because of lower rotational mass, as well as other factors (caching on the drive, number of platters, etc.)

Right now my primary laptop drive is close to 40% faster than a brand-new Maxtor drive in a very fast server in the server room:

Laptop

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 2416 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1207.58 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 110 MB in 3.04 seconds = 36.20 MB/sec

/dev/hdc:
Timing cached reads: 2416 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1206.98 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 102 MB in 3.04 seconds = 33.52 MB/sec

Server

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 556 MB in 2.01 seconds = 276.38 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 134 MB in 3.01 seconds = 44.51 MB/sec

/dev/hdb:
Timing cached reads: 624 MB in 2.01 seconds = 310.65 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 102 MB in 3.01 seconds = 33.91 MB/sec

External HDD - Quark anyone?

[beetlefeet]

This reminds me of our old mac plus. We had an external HDD. It was called a "Quark" I think and it was about as big as a decent sized VCR.

It's was 10 megabytes if I remember correctly. And you could boot off of it! (If you used the Quark Loader boot disk).

Then we got a 386 with a 40meg hard drive INSIDE IT (wow).

Apple's 64-bit support is weak

[kylef]

First of all, let's recap. When Apple introduced the G5 two years ago, you may remember the ads which proclaimed "The World's First 64-bit Personal Computer." What they forgot to mention was a pretty fundamental flaw with their claim: their flagship OS X could not actually run any 64-bit applications!

It has taken two years and 2 OS releases for Apple to add limited support for 64-bit applications to OS-X. Even today, apps which utilize any graphical application framework libraries (i.e. any GUI application) cannot run in 64-bit mode. Apple actually expects software vendors to redesign their GUI apps to fork off 64-bit processes to perform any "compute-intensive" or "memory-intensive" work. Right! Nevertheless, I'm sure some vendors will do this work, no matter how silly.

Contrast this with 64-bit support in Windows. Microsoft released its first 64-bit version of Windows in q1 2002 (see PC World announcement from 2001) [pcworld.com]. But few actually remember because it ran only on Itanium, on hardware which virtually no one except elite vendors could purchase. That version of Windows was quite limited, but even then not as limited as Apple's latest Tiger. Even in 2002, 64-bit Windows apps could run in full GUI mode and could utilize all system libraries except for multimedia decoding and DirectX libraries.

The point is this: for app vendors to port their apps to 64-bit Windows, very little work is required. In many cases, simply recompiling does the trick. In other cases, broken integer-pointer casts must be fixed, but little else. Certainly no redesign is required! To make this app transition so smooth required a large amount of work. Millions of lines of code making up the entire Windows codebase (not just the relatively small kernel) had to be made 64-bit clean. Additionally, it took lots of design thought to solve some of the tricky AppCompat issues to enable 32-bit and 64-bit apps to live side-by-side. You can read alot about how this works in Windows XP Pro x64 here [microsoft.com].

Second of all, your claim that 64-bit Windows drivers are unavailable and unstable is complete balderdash. I would love to hear which currently-shipping 64-bit systems out there don't have available drivers (and I mean vendor-supplied systems here, not some homebrew with a random motherboard). I would also like to hear about ones that are buggy and unstable. MSN and several other top-tier internet sites have already switched to x64-based servers. From personal experience, I have 64-bit XP running on at least 4 different motherboard chipsets in 24/7 environments and I have yet to see a blue screen on any of them. All with inbox drivers: I didn't lift a finger.

Granted, vendor-supplied drivers for peripherals which don't work with class drivers is currently limited on Windows x64, as happens whenever a new version of Windows comes out that requires driver changes (remember Win2k?). But it's extremely ironic to hear Apple people use the term "limited" in reference to hardware support, even referring to Windows x64. I'd bet that inbox device support for x64 is greater than the totality of device support for OSX Tiger. And as for peripherals, most USB and Firewire devices will work fine, because they utilize class drivers which Microsoft owns and therefore ports itself.

Yes, you can bet that Apple is embarrassed by its lack of 64-bit application support even with its latest Tiger release. But Apple has done a masterful job of sweeping that lack of support under the carpet with fantastic marketing. I know many G5 owners who had no clue until I told them that their G5 actually could not run 64-bit applications because OS-X did not support it. I actually feel kind of bad for them: I'm sure they felt a bit miffed that their promised "World's First 64-bit Personal Computer" was not actually a useful 64-bit system. I know I would be.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[SmittyTheBold]

That's with the specific hardware solution, though. What we're talking about is software RAID, something Windows XP Home does not support.

Linux, as a point of fact, does support software RAID quite well. You know, in case you were curious.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[steve_bryan]

Hmm, I'm not certain if I am reading your comment correctly but if you are asking if a Mac can format a floppy while doing other tasks the answer is a qualified YES. Macs haven't had floppy drives for quite a few years but with OS X the Mac is much more robust and stable than WindowsXP at doing things like formatting disks as just one more task that can easily be done in the background. Of course you can still buy floppy drives from third party companies if you want to format some floppies on a Mac and check my assertion.

My personal experience with loading down OS X with tasks versus doing the same sort of thing with WindowsXP is that the Mac just keeps working while my Windows box becomes unusable and often will crash. For instance if I'm watching HDTV on my PC and absent mindedly use Samba to transfer a file to or from my PC it is time to reboot. I can do things on my PC when it is formatting but it isn't pretty. Finally, the thing that really matters is that Azureus functions invisibly in the background on my Mac but it is a pain the butt if I try to run it on my PC and anything else happens.

So oddly enough that old chesnut about Windows users happily formatting floppies in the background to the amazement of Mac pre OS X users has been turned completely around for OS X.

4500?

[Anonymous Coward]

there is no such thing as 4500rpm
there are these following speeds:
4200
5400
7200
10000
15000
now, there were the quantum bigfoot 5.25 drives that came in 3600 & 4000; but most hard drives made since 1999 follow the above mantra

Re:Size/Price/Performance - 3.5" always beats 2.5"

[evilviper]

Firewire shoeboxes are usually a bit more expensive than USB2, but I don't know if Apple's USB2 drivers are as fast as their firewire drivers, so check it out if it matters to you.

Uhh, 480Mbps USB2.0 is slower than Firewire-400, period. No matter how wonderful the software/drivers, nothing can change that. Yes, I realize the numbers for USB2 are higher, but they are just marketing numbers, and reality is very different.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[mr100percent]

Maybe, but how easy is it to setup and partition and repair? The Mac has it easier.

Re:..its not that suprising

[swiftstream]

One URL:

http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp [micronet.com]

Re:Quality control

[Gilmoure]

No, Apple's moved from the $1500-$3500 range for computers down to $500-$2500 range. In order to keep profits up, costs have to be cut. In part, this is done through good design but more seems to be through commodity manufacturing, out-house. When you're having your stuff built on someone else's assembly line, it's hard to keep on top of quality control.

Re:Yes

[Shanep]

If it sees the Firewire drive at all, like when you hold down the Option key when booting, you should have no problem booting from the external drive.

If I plug the firewire drive in, then start or restart the mini, I get a grey screen without the lighter grey Apple logo ever appearing.

I use the drive no problem within OS X, if I plug it in or switch it on after the Apple logo appears.

After booting from the Panther install DVD, I plug the firewire drive in and install to it (from memory) with no problem. However when restarting, I get the blank grey screen and nothing more.

I've tried getting to OFW, holding down appropriate keys etc, but it seems the machine locks before these can be used.

I haven't heard of a non-bootable Firewire chipset.

Take note: Prolific PL3507. Now you have. This [punknix.com] guy has the same unit as mine and describes the same problem I have. Googling for "PL3507 mac boot" was less than pleasant, then there was some hope, which was dashed when I opened the unit back up to find I had revision A of this chipset. Which cannot be software flash upgraded, only with a hardware flash writer.

The PL3507 is truely a steaming pile of crap. If it works for you, it will corrupt your drive within weeks.

The problem is most likely the drive.

In desperation, I have tried three different drives (Maxtor 160GB, Seagate 120GB and Western Digital 80GB!) in this enclosure. No joy. Certainly not the drive and the history of the PL3507 confirms this. Right now I am removing the Seagate 120GB from the enclosure because in light of all this terrible info, I will not trust this chipset to anything.