Someone's already done this:

http://www.budget-ha.com/apple/mac-mini-firewire/

Thanks for the link.

From what I understand, that guy spent only $ 50. So I assume he didn't even get a high-performance drive (no specs, that would have been nice).
I guess a 7200 HD should give my mini quite a nice boost then...

-t

You're welcome!

I think he already had the 7200 drive on hand (from an older machine). So the $50 was for the Firewire enclosure.

The general consensus has been that an external FW400 7200 RPM drive won't create a faster Mac mini.

I was lucky and had a Hitachi 60GB 7200rpm in my Dell laptop.

I swapped that drive with the 80GB 4200rpm Mini drive and it made a HUGE difference.

I have an emergency copy of OS X on an external Firewire drive, but I don't use it as my main drive. Seems you'd be hostage to the 167MHz bus and the Firewire port in that case.

It's pricey, but an internal 7200rpm drive made a tangible difference.

You know what, if that works as well as it seems, it would also make upgrading totally easy as plugging in a hard drive. Wow. I was gonna get a FW HD for backup. Maybe I should use it for my main files instead. Use the internal HD and my older HD as backup instead.

I mean I'm a fan of LaCie's HD's. Especially the design of the Porsche/. I have my eye on the 200GB model.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10553

If it weren't for the noisy fan on the old blue and silver one I have now, I'd be using that one.

But I believe the LaCie is powered fy an AC adapter. Is there a relatively fast FireWire 400 HD with a large capacity out there that can be powered by the FireWire port but still be pretty capable?

Contrary to general consensus, the web page I posted at the beginning of this thread shows benchmark figures indicating it IS faster.

If I had a Mini, I would probably buy a 7200rpm replacement drive for the Mini and then put the displaced drive into an external Firewire box.

If you do buy a hard drive, get a Seagate.

I believe they are the only company offering a 5 year warranty on their drives.

One of my 200GB desktop drives is making funny noises, so I check it out, and it's under warranty until 2009.

[ ] You know what you are talking about

-t

An external drive is a good option. Prior to upgrading the internal drive, I ran the Mini off a WD 7200RPM 8Mb cache 3 1/2" drive via a firewire box. I had the 40Gb 5400RPM drive originally and it felt significantly faster.

I don't have definitive specs but barefeats does. Check the link out.

http://barefeats.com/mini01c.html

I ended up putting a Samsung 80Gb 5400RPM drive into the Mini to keep things neater and to free up the firewire port. I could have used a firewire hub but wanted to stay with a single box. May try a source a minimate or the like.

The difference in cache size alone made a difference. Give it a go if you've got the gear or the inclination.

Thx, another great resource.

-t

Alright, I did it.

Got a Seagate 7200 RPM, 200GB, 8MB cache drive ($ 70 after rebate) and put it in a ext. HD enclosure from CompUSA ($ 35 on sale).

My mini is flying

On average, it's about 2 times as fast as the internal 80 GB in my mini (according to XBench).
It makes a huge difference in start times. I guess if I add the 1 GB RAM, I should be good for a while...

BTW, I got several ext. HD enclosures and Xbenched them. The CompUSA one was the fastest and best bang for the buck. I guess if I had invested more than twice as much in an www.owc.net enclosure, I might get even faster data transfers, but I'm fine with what I got.

-t

I'm about to buy a FW HD for myself to do this same thing too. But I want to have the Home on a second partition. The thing I'm wondering about is how to go about it.

My question is when it comes time to reinstall the OS, will it automatically pick up my Home on the other partition right away? Or will I have to again set it up to point to it? And if so, what do I do to do this?

I just need steps to take when A) Setting up the first time and B) setting up again after a reinstall. I can handle the copying of files myself.

I think this is what your looking for.

http://maczealots.com/articles/home/

Maczealots to the rescue. Pretty straightforward.

Why only the Home and not the full OS + Home ?

OS X on a slow disk will slow you down as well. Longer boot time, and especially the scratch partition read/write delay will suck. I put EVERYTHING on my external HD and boot from it. The internal mini HD I only use for incremental backups.

-t

I figured it'd be easier to backup and do reinstalls with Home separate. In this case, I'd have OS X on one partition and Home on another, both on a separate FW HD with a faster speed than the internal HD. (Which I'd use for maybe some documents or stuff.)

I just need to know the steps for how to do it.

Don't do it. There is nothing to gain.

In case you still want to do it, use superduper.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDu...escription.html

-t

Don't do what? Move the User to another partition or don't get a FW drive to run the computer on?

Don't move the Home folder to another location. There's no speed gain, and OS X isn't the same as most other *NIXs in that regard.

Oh, I know I wasn't gonna gain speed. I wanted to move the Home folder to make upgrades easier. Sorry, I shouldn't have added that in this thread.

Why are upgrades easier with the Home folder being on an external disk ?
What upgrades anyways ?

-t

Duh, the former. I do the later myself. That's what this thread is about

-t

I have to ask how using another spindle isn't going to help with speed under certain situations ?

Precaching will help but for long reads and writes, a second disk might help if the OS drive is busy with swap ? The data may flood the internal bus but at least it would be working data through two channels (the internal IDE and the firewire port).

I don't think it can hurt.

OS installs and upgrades. I'm tired of having to copy my Home to another drive to do an install of the latest Mac OS. People have been putting their Homes on separate partitions for a long time. And I've thought it was a great idea forever. It just makes it easier. It's much easier to just reformat your main OS partition and clean install without having to worry about backing up your Home first. It's just a lot faster. I want to share in that easiness.

where?

Like I said, Supderduper is our friend. It does all that and more.

-t

Has anyone had any experiences with the drive enclosure/FW USB hub mini form-factor add-ons? They certainly looked very good, and you get your 7200 RPM drive while increasing the number of ports and not using up any more room (it just makes your mini an inch and half or whatever taller). People seemed quite excited with them when they were announced, but now I haven't heard anything at all.

I don't like them at all. That's all I have to say about them.