*sigh* Mini Hard Drive

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caveatipss

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Why would Apple put a slow 5400 rpm hard drive in the Mini? Do all Mac drives spin that slowly, or is the iMac faster? That is the sort of thing that makes me notwant a Mac. It seems like sometimes, they go out of their way to use slow versipons of things. *sigh*
 
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I don't know why the mini has a 5400rpm hard drive, but the iMac's is 7200rpm.
 

dtravis7


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The MINI has a 5400 RPM Hard Drive because it's basically a Laptop in a small case. It uses a Laptop Hard Drive and most are 5400 or even slower. There are some 7200 RPM Laptop drives but they are high in cost..
 
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the mac mini has a 2.5" drive (same size as a laptop drive)(correct me if i'm wrong), and the imac has a 3.5" drive(same size as the powermac drives)
 
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Badger

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As stated above, much of the mini design is based on using laptop hardware. There are several sites that have installed 7200 rpm drives in the mini. While they seem to have worked without immediate problems all of them noted that the 7200 rpm drives generate more heat than slower drives. The long-term effect of the extra heat is unknown. Several of the sites also noted that the improvement by increasing the RAM was system wide whereas disk speed is more limited to specific operations and programs.
 
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The new mini's are sata i believe, which is a bit faster.
 
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Ghostshadow said:
The new mini's are sata i believe, which is a bit faster.

I dare you to find a single PATA drive that can saturate a 133 IDE bus...SATA is no faster than PATA in reality.
 
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the mini is also the their low end machine meant mainly for general computing stuff like word processing, mail, internet. it can be used for applications like adobe CS2 but will be slower.

an external firewire hard disk could help alleviate your problems especially if you are doing music recording or video editing. this helps greatly because the drive is not being written to and read from at the same time. this way it reads the program stuff from your mini's hard disk and writes all your stuff to the external disk.

if you want something witha faster drive look into used powermacs (i think you already have thought about that though in another thread) which can be purchased for less than a new powermac or imac but about twice as much as the mini. they are still great computers

good luck!
-chris
 
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5400RPM is pretty standard for 2.5in drives. The 7200RPM 2.5in drives are a pretty decent jump in price over a 5400RPM models. They have come down in price a lot lately but they are still a bit pricey.
 
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Hard drives are cheap these days.

If you can, buy a internet hard drive and place it in a external case (you can get them from quite a few shops) and use it as an external hard drive :)
 
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Pixel_Donkey said:
Hard drives are cheap these days.

If you can, buy a internet hard drive and place it in a external case (you can get them from quite a few shops) and use it as an external hard drive :)


You can find large 3.5in hard drives cheap, but a 60GB 7200RPM 2.5in drive is going to be over $100. I wouldn't want an external hard drive for my laptop.
 
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*sigh*
ANOTHER thread complaining about "poor" quality parts that Apple uses.

Nevermind that the Mini is the lowest of the low on the Mac totem pole.
I would suggest trying one out and seeing how it actually performs for your desired task at hand before criticizing the components within.
And if you are a "power" user, then a Mini is not the right Mac for you anyway and you shouldn't buy it, so why bother waxing philosophic about what parts are used in it anyway?

My brother has one and it does exactly what he needs it to do, and does that well.
I have a PowerBook because I use the Adobe creative suite on a daily basis.

Just get the system that works best for your needs and don't worry about the system that doesn't.

:black:
 
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caveatipss

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Well, the thing is that I cannot AFFORD a high end Mac. But I COULD get a POC with a 7500 rpm hard drive for $1,400, the price of the highest iMac. Since this is a forum for people thinking of buying Macs, I felt that my question/complaint was entirely appropriate. I want to know why the Mini's drive is slower than a comparably-priced PC, ok?
 
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Kokopelli

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Fair enough. Unfortunately price comparisons are not of any use in this scenario.

Macs are not Windows machines.

Windows machines are not Macs.

For equivalent hardware you will generally spend more money on your Mac than you would in a Windows machine. You can argue engineering, software, support, what have you. It really does not change the fact that in most circumstances, based on hardware alone, Macs are more expensive.

So the mini, which really has no equivalent in the PC world, has a notebook hard drive. In order to keep costs lower and profit margins up Apple cut a couple corners. Either accept it or don't.
 
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caveatipss said:
I want to know why the Mini's drive is slower than a comparably-priced PC, ok?


Because there are no common PC desktops that are so small that they require the use of a 2.5in HD. You just can't compare.
 
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caveatipss

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mynameis said:
Because there are no common PC desktops that are so small that they require the use of a 2.5in HD. You just can't compare.

Shuttle PCs do.
 
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caveatipss said:
Shuttle PCs do.

I don't think Shuttle offers anything in the same form factor with a 3.5in drive.
 
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IronMac said:
I don't think Shuttle offers anything in the same form factor with a 3.5in drive.

Shuttle offers a 3.5" drive in a form factor that is only slightly larger than the Mini.
 

dtravis7


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The Shuttle PC is NOT a mini and does NOT use Laptop parts. Have you looked inside the Mini? Not trying to be a jerk about this, but dang, The Mini is a Laptop without a screen.
 
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caveatipss

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Right, I understand. I guess my only point is that they do not have to use laptop parts, since Shuttle can do it with desktop parts. But I understand.
 

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