FireWire for 75% Better Mac mini Disk Performance 533
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."
not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
ostiguy
I bought the MacMini for the form factor.. (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, the findings of improved speed with an external firewire drive is hardly surprising. Laptop hard drives (which the Mini uses) are notoriously slow, and if you're one of those who got a 4200 RPM drive with their Mini it's even worse than normal.
Still, nifty to know it works.
I'm curious though - has anyone replaced their mini's hard drive with a higher RPM laptop drive? Did that help matters much? I wouldn't mind going for a speed upgrade if I can keep the sleek, tiny form factor =)
-Amich
Re:Question (Score:2, Interesting)
Recommended HD? (Score:2, Interesting)
What's good in the 2.5", 5400-7200RPM 80GB+/- market now? I'm looking to avoid the scenerio where a crappy drive fails in the 2nd year of the warrenty and you just have to decide to get the next one bigger rather than do the warrenty repair.
Re:If you want performance, don't use mac (Score:3, Interesting)
However, there are two other aspects you fail to acknowlege.
Firstly, most people, most of the time, are not waiting for their computer to do something. It's the chair-to-computer interface that is the bottleneck (people interacting with their software), so an increase in efficiency here is a big boost in (what I would call) performance. There's a lot more to performance than GFLOPS - remember, a computer is a tool, not an end in itself.
Secondly (and perhaps less importantly), although the specs of Macs might not be as great as PCs, the quality of their componentry is arguably better. Macs, in general, have a low hardware fail rate, and this could be attributed to better (albeit, less powerful) hardware. Many 'high-performance' PCs, especially those that are relatively cheap, are not made by Tier 1 companies from reliable hardware*.
*This is my opinion only, and hasn't been extensively researched.
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
You can prevent this from happening by setting an Open Firmware password, but for re-imaging machines, it is a godsend.
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.
Dollars signs aside, I can assure you that FireWire disk mode is quite gratifying to watch when you've done something stupid to your machine and rendered it unbootable.
I don't know if the same thing is possible with USB and PCs, but I know that trying to recover Windows 2000 by using a FireWire disk enclosure is impossible, and I assume this holds true for XP as well.
Re:The Real Crime... (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, they haven't yet. All the Xbox360 demos were running on Power Mac G5s.
Re:And if you want something really cool (Score:3, Interesting)
OS X Lousy filesystem performance overall (Score:3, Interesting)
Compared to OS9, X's accessing our server is like slogging through mud, I can tell most of it is it hitting the server trying to get the icons for all the files (ALL the files), and there is no way to turn off custom icon view. We are using AppleTalk, and I have heard SMB is a marked improvement, not because it's the fault od appletalk, but the waty X handles appletalk.
Also USB sucks too, you can't boot from a USB CD in 10, (9 is no problem, speed is not that bad in 9, but really lame in 10). (I suspect it has to dso with the overhead 10 has in device dection on the USB.) Maybe it's all thier legacy interfaces (ATA and USB) that are speed dogs.
Apple has a bit of work on improving some of these OS X core components to make me say it really rocks.
Size/Price/Performance - 3.5" always beats 2.5" (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's web page says they're "inexpansive but never cheap", even though they've used a 4200rpm wimp-sized drive - oh, well :-) If the cheap 40GB version isn't big enough for you, you're probably better off getting an external drive than upgrading to the cheap 80GB version, and if it doesn't perform well enough, add RAM, because 256MB isn't enough for everybody.
Re:And if you want something really cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Also... this is a fairly thin laptop (but it does get pretty hot... mostly do to the QuadroFX videocard in it).
Friedmud
Re:The Real Crime... (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple ranters like you can bitch and moan all day long while looking over the details.
Perhaps Apple did slack on the 64 bit OS but it probably has to do with the fact that they see no real rush to make Mac OS X fully 64 bit. It's not the OS that really needs the features of a 64 bit CPU, it's certain applications such as Photoshop that benefit from them.
Maybe I just have different priorities; a lot of the slashdot crowd is greatly obsessed with raw SUV-like power in their computers. I like power too but if it's a machine that's going to be sitting in a living area (bedroom, living room, etc) I don't want the sound of a wind tunnel coming from my fan (no matter how quiet the fan motor is you can't stop air from making noise as it's being forced against a heat sink).
I think Apple is still a technology leader because they try to push the limits of keeping both power and user friendliness in a single package. Your other options usually tend to either be really powerful but somewhat hostile or very friendly but underpowered or inefficient.
Re:And if you want something really cool (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Quality control (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not an "IT person," but doesn't this KB article [microsoft.com] say it is possible to recover Windows 2000 by using a FireWire disk enclosure? From the article:
In other words, I think it depends on the hardware (FireWire controller) and BIOS (Firmware on Macs) more than the OS. I'd think any modern OS (like Windows 2000 or OS X) would support this if the FireWire controller and BIOS/Firware supported it. A built-in FireWire controller is more likely to support this than a PCI card.Again, I'm not an "IT person." Sorry if I'm not talking about the same thing.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a 5400rpm internal HDD in my Powerbook, and a WD 200Gb 7200rpm w 8mb cache drive in an external case, which is connected via Firewire 800.
On a pure comparison of disk performance using xbench, the internal HDD scored 65.54 and the external drive scored 57.12 (where the higher number is better). That says to me that at least as far as benchmarking is concerned, an average speed internal HDD can still outperform a very good external drive connected via even Firewire800.
Overall, I wonder when people say "it feels faster" whether it reallly is, or whether they just want to believe that it is
Re:The Real Crime... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why the Avalon Graphics system of Longhorn is so important. Scaling of both text and images are no longer limited to a pixelated basis as the current version of WindowsXP and YES, even OSX.
There is no reason to not have 150-300dpi display devices just because the OS is not capable of properly scaling the applications to readable size.
I use a 1600x1200 15" Laptop, and run it at full resolution. I might have better eye site than the average, but when doing Graphic design, the clearity makes our Mac laptops look like toys.
..its not that suprising (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And if you want something really cool (Score:2, Interesting)
Depends on how dodgy your hardware controllers are, I suppose. And not everyone wants "cool", some of us just want "works reliably".
I've run a fleet of AIX systems which had the equivelent of software RAID 1 (mirroring) and later added RAID 0 (striping) in the OS since at least the 3.1 days.
It is very, very, very convenient to be able to pull bog-standard drives into logical volumes with bog-standard controllers. Especially if management won't approve $5000 expenses for a $200,000 computer. (I'm not kidding--took me 4 years and hundreds of lost work-hours to get approval to buy UPSes for half a million dollars worth of computer. This was 10 years back, divide all the prices by 10, and multiply the performance by 20.)
And RAID-in-hardware really only matters with the parity calculated versions; if you just want cheap and quick redundancy, mirror your data onto two disks--it's not like that's expensive these days.
Another advantage of simple mirroring is access is very fast--there's no parity calculation required. (Though truly paranoid modes will read from both disks and compare the results; but in two-way mirroring, the only thing you really have to rely on is the I/O error indicators from the drive transport and checksumming.)
SATA HOWTO for mini (Score:4, Interesting)
I bought my mini for the software. Years ago I paid for a miniDV camcorder, because I knew that someday I would be able to afford a computer to edit the footage with. That day finally came!
But the HDD stinks. External SATA is possible, and the best answer. Here's why...
OPTIONS
FW 400
While I *might* go for an external FW 400 solution, the mini only has one FW port... and copying DV material from a camcorder to a FW HDD on the same channel is a no-no.
USB 2.0
slower than FW 400 on the mini, according to what I've read. But more importantly, the mini won't boot from USB.
External 3.5" PATA
Ah, now we're talking! Check out these articles: 4 sweet solutions, all of which allow use of 3.5" HDDs on the mini's own ATA/100 controller:
mini in a PC box
http://www.appletalk.com.au/articles/miniserver/ [appletalk.com.au]
mini with an external drive box housing an ATA HDD
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/ar
mini ensconsed in a Centris 660
(Check out the XBench scores table)
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/ar
And best of all (IMHO), the purple mini
http://macmod.com/content/view/273/2/ [macmod.com]
External 3.5" SATA
The problem with the external PATA solutions is that the form factor sucks. Which got me thinking: If I could only use one of those fancy new SATA cables...
PARTS LIST
1. PATA to SATA bridgeboard:
http://www.google.com/search?q=PATA2SATA [google.com]
2. IDE Hard Drive Cable Adapter - 2.5'' to 3.5''
http://www.google.com/search?q=StarTech+IDE4044 [google.com]
3. 44 Pin Male to Male IDC 2.5" IDE Laptop Gender Changer
http://www.google.com/search?q=+44+Pin+Male+to+Ma
DETAILS
I don't yet have the money to do this project, or you would have already heard the results.
Assemble the three components together (and trim off the unneeded power connection from the 2.5" to 3.5" cable adapter). You now have an assembly that fits within the space normally occupied by the mini's 2.5" HDD.
WARNING: the real unknown is whether or not you can actually then snake an SATA cable from the bridge board and out the back (or side) of the mini. But I think it will work. Assuming it does...
RESULTS
There are more and more SATA drive enclosures hitting the market. This year the trend is multiplexing backplanes, so that you can RAID multiple SATA drives in the enclosure and connect them via one channe back to the computer.
Pick an attractive SATA drive enclosure, plug it in, connect it to the mini, and off you go!
Phil Lawrence
--
feel free to email me if you'd like details about the success or failure of the project, once I get the parts together
What does "64-bit" really mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. If you really need 64-bit, you know it.
If you just think 64-bit is all about speed, you're confused... the reason the 64-bit Alpha was fast and stayed at the front of the pack with far less effort than Intel had to go through (at least until it got Compaqted) was less the fact that it was 64-bit (in fact programs in 32-bit mode were often faster) than the fact that DEC was able to start with a clean slate and design a good fast CPU architecture without having loads of backwards compatibility to worry about.
The reason AMD's 64-bit stuff is fast is the same, they're able to shed a lot of the IA32 cruft and add a lot more register file space.
And that's why 64-bit Power PC doesn't give you the same boost, because it's already a pretty good CPU architecture, it doesn't have a need for a massive overhaul.
So unless you REALLY need 64 bit, and if you do you already know you need it and you know why you need it and you're not whinging about whether Apple's 64-bit is "real" or not because you're already using it, it doesn't matter if your 64-bit is real or not, because you don't need it and won't use it even if you have it.
2. If you think Windows is "real" 64-bit, think again.
Even the latest 64-bit Windows isn't using a pure 64-bit model, even in 64-bit mode. DEC went with a full 64-bit model that matched the native Alpha 64-bit register set, and most of the other UNIX systems went with 64-bit longs and 64-bit pointers, but Windows uses 32-bit longs and 64-bit pointers, and you need a special "long long" data type to do pointer and offset arithmetic. So, using code that actually addresses more than 4G of RAM on Windows is going to remain tricky for a while.
Apple uses the intermediate model, with 64-bit pointers, and both 64 and 32-bit integers (int and long). This requires a little more complexity than the Alpha 64-bit model, but it lets 64-bit programs that people are already using work without change. So while you can't call the 32-bit GUI libraries from 64-bit mode, most 64-bit code is server software or command-line batch applications that don't make GUI calls at all... and that'll just work on Tiger.
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.
The fact that they had no clue means they didn't need it, and the only advantage of the 64-bit hardware for them (like for virtually everyone else in the entire world, except for people who already knew about it because anyone who really needed it was on top of that kind of detail) was that it let them use more than 4G of physical RAM. shared among all their (32-bit and WAY less than 4G long) apps.
And from the very first the Powermac G5 supported up to 8G.
So for the only purpose that mattered to them, they already had a useful 64-bit system.
The people who ought to feel miffed are the ones who've already been using ILP64 or LP64 code for years, who will have to port it to the IL32P64 Windows mess.
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
And you propose, instead, for me to go and sit down in front of the machine (which I have to do anyway). To boot off of a netboot server... or, rather, at least three different netboot servers (one for Macs, one for Windows machines, one for Linux). And then connect to a network share and recover the files from the hard disk over the network. (Did I mention that this is actually a fairly heavily used 100-base-t network, without any schmancy gigabit backbone?)
And this is somehow simpler and more reasonable than plugging in the pocket drive? Not to mention the fact that I have to maintain the netboot servers, and update them, and keep anyone from booting off of them 'accidentally'? And that the netboot is probably managing 20 mbps or so, 40 if I'm amazingly lucky, as are the file transfers, whereas firewire is pegging the hard drive?
I think you and I have a very different idea of the word 'solution', let alone the word 'simple'.
BTW, as for being able to boot PCs off of USB, you can... as long as you only have one model of computer, as we do. If you have the usual hodgepodge, you are SOL, unless you want to have a dozen of these little hard drives. I would assume the same is true of netboot images, but there may be some magic thingie that makes it all work. If not, I can think of few chores I'd like less than to maintain half a dozen netboot images, including weekly software updates because I'm scared to fall too far behind Microsoft's moving target.
-fred