Best HD for the mini

[Rosso]

I currently own a slow 4200 rpm 80 gig on my mac mini. What I want is a speed increase. What HD do you people recommend and why? Also This is a music server so noisy whining HDs need not apply. Ta
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Mac mini

[devo]

I would buy one of the 100.0GB Toshiba MK1032GAX 5400RPM drives with 16MB cache. It'll give you more space and speed. The larger cache should speed things up and might keep the noise down. I'm not a drive expert but it would seem the drive would't have to read/write as much compared to something with a 8MB cache.

[Susurrus]

Right now, 16mb cache doesn't actually make that much of a speed improvement for hard drives. A better option than a 5400rpm with 16Mb cache would be the 7k60 drive by Hitachi. It's 7200rpm, 8mb cache, ATA100, all that good stuff. It's pretty much the standard when it comes to upgrading the internal hard drive for the Mini and it retails for under $150.

If you'd looking for something bigger, the 7k60 has a sister drive: the 7k100. Same everything except that it has 100Gb of storage.

I plan on going with the 7k60 because of the cheaper price and that for my primary hard drive 60Gb seems to be plenty for me. I plan on having lots of external hard drive space to store my media on though.
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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

[Bandit Bill]

[bsnoel]

[Austin MacTexas]

[bubba]

Going external instead of upgrading the internal hard drive isn't going to help much. Firewire is not going to be faster than the IDE bus (unless it's Firewire 800, which the mini doesn't have). Go with the 60gb 7200 RPM, or if you're on a budget, 5400 RPM. But whats the point of having a tiny computer if you have to rely on an external drive, that is almost as big as the mini to boot the damn thing.

This is ATA 133, but still, ATA100 should not be far behind:

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=diskinterfaces&page=6
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Your signature sucks.

[Susurrus]

The performance difference between ATA100 and ATA133 is nonexistant, so that's a non-issue.

Also, getting an external is nice because it's a) cheaper, b) portable between computers, and c) you don't have to pay to install or install yourself the internal hard drive.

The performance degradation from a FW drive will not be that much slower than an internal drive. Not noticable unless you were doing benchmarks, really, or depended on the highest performance from your drive. In that case, you wouldn't want a Mini anyways, as it doesn't support SATA, SCSI over SATA, 10k, or 15k drives right now, and only has room for 1 drive.
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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

[aristobrat]

I'm confused about external performance vs internal performance.

Below are two xBench results from my mini. First one is the internal harddrive. Second one is an external Seagate firewire harddrive. The external firewire seems to benchmark almost 2x faster. I know that doesn't translate into making the mini feel 2x faster, but you'd think that there'd be some advantage to running off the firewire drive, no?

[curt]

What's your overall score? That's just the disk test. You should see a 10-20 point increase in the overall score if you're booting from that drive.
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1.42GHz Mac mini
1.66GHz Intel Mac mini
2.0GHz 2009 Mac mini
46" Sony LCD
50" Sony KDS-50A2000
EyeTV 250 Plus
My Setup

[Susurrus]

[WC3_Gamer]

An external HD would obviously be slower, even if the FW was 800, but it's 400, so I'm sure there's some difference in speed..right?
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Gone.

[aristobrat]

[iMav]

[Gmas]

I wouldn't necessarily agree the internal 7200 2.5 is faster than an external FW 7200 3.5 , benchmarks at barefeats:

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

suggest otherwise.

Or am I missing something in the previous posts?

Thanks,
Gmas.