mac mini future

[aristobrat]

On my mini the harddrive speed is the bottleneck, not the CPU.

I know I can boot off of an external firewire drive, but I think it'd be cool if Apple started throwing in faster stock internal drives.

[Susurrus]

It is a bottleneck, but it's less of one once you have enough RAM. Also, the iBook and many other laptops have slower hard drives. The only reason this is more of an issue here is that people have higher expectations for a desktop, even if the form factor is the same as for a laptop, roughly.
_________________
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

[anthonymoody]

The speed increase achieved by booting off a fast 7200rpm FW external drive is waaaaaay better than that achieved by going from 512 to a gig of RAM. I should know - I did both.

When I upped the RAM things got a little better, though to be honest I think what I was feeling was some placebo effect. I'd just spent $100 on RAM so it had to be faster right?

Then I started booting of an external FW drive, a 7200rpm ministack. Holy smokes!!! My xbench scores went from 113 to 134 overall, an 18% increase. but the gains in the drive tests were b/t 50 and 100%. Since drive access/throughput is such a common bottleneck the *practical* performance increase is way more than the 18% indicated in my overall xbench scores.

To be honest, it felt like a new machine. No mini hangs, no lags, almost no more spinning beach balls, etc. A really shocking difference.

TM