Questions about formatting MiniStack (M9) drive

[greg]

According to UPS my MiniStack (M9) will arrive today.
So now, still being fairly new to Macs, I have a question about how to set up the second drive to do the following:

1. Remove my 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda drive from my old PC and install in the MiniStack. This will become my video scratch drive (I burn/edit a lot of DVD movies).

2. Format the Seagate and make it bootable

3. Boot off of the MiniStack/Seagate and compare xbench results with those when booting of my 80GB internal.

4. When done playing around, switch back to booting off my internal 80GB

Why continue to boot off my internal? As I said, the MiniStack/Seagate will primarily be used as a scratch drive for DVD burning, etc. I'm only interested in booting off of it temporarily to see how much of an improvement it is over my current configuration. Long term, I plan on replacing my internal 80GB drive with a 7200RPM 100GB Hitachi or Seagate 2.5" when they become generally available. Performance is acceptable for now.
_________________
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
miniStack 500GB
Dell 1905FP
Logitech Wave Cordless Desktop

[Susurrus]

So are you asking about how to actually remove and install your old PC drive or how to use OS X and format that drive, clone your old hard drive onto the external, and then boot off of both to compare XBench?

To do the former, a screwdrive and some brains would go a long way. To do the latter...

To clone onto the firewire, link.

To format external drive as HFS+ use Disk Utility. Should be fairly straight forward. Just leave it as one partition in HFS+, you can use journaling if you want, but that's a feature designed for servers.
_________________
Computer Engineer
Junior, Brown University
15" NC8430 HP Laptop
1.42Ghz PPC Mac Mini, 1Gb RAM, 1st Gen
40GB G4 iPod
2GB Black iPod Nano

[greg]

[greg]

I'd like to hear from some of you on this forum who have actually done this with external FW drives and a Mac Mini. Any comments on your experience? Performance? Any issues you ran into?
_________________
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
miniStack 500GB
Dell 1905FP
Logitech Wave Cordless Desktop

[Brendan]

[anthonymoody]

I'm using a 400GB ministack, partitioned (roughly) 100/300. I boot off the 100 partition, backup to the internal drive, and will use the 300 partition for media editing/scratch.

My xbench overall score went from 113 to 134. While it's "only" an 18.% improvement, the drive scores are almost 2x better using the ministack. As a result, my mini feels waaaaaay more responsive than it did prior. More snappy, fewer lags, fewer spinning beach balls, etc.

TM

[idave]