Apple Cause of slow performance with Minis?

I've had a Mini for a few months now, and the one thing that I find annoying is how slow some applications can be to respond.

For example, if I click on System Preferences and then choose "Desktop & Screen Saver", it can take three seconds to load. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're doing a lot on the Mac it becomes painful to load applications. (I should point out that once something is loaded it's fine, but things always seem to take a long time to kick in.)

Is this something to do with the 4200 rpm hard drive, or just the performance of the Mac Mini as a whole? (I'm running a 1.42Ghz Mini with 512Mb RAM.)

 

I read an article today that says an external firewire hard disc is quicker than the internal ones , the hdd is supposed to be the major downside of the mini. I'd put it down to that causing your problems

 

The only prob is that if I start adding external hard drives and such it starts becoming less "Mini", if you know what I mean.

Does anyone know if there's a way to upgrade the hard drive to something faster? (Clueless on the subject, I don't know if I need to have some sort of warped Mac hardware to upgrade it with.)

 

5400rpm HDDs not 4200 in the Minis, and it is definitely the bottleneck in the system... I guess that heat is an issue too with faster RPM drives, as well as power as they're notebook drives.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/17/0040220&tid=164&tid=198&tid=174&tid=3

edit: where did those 3 other replies come from? They're just notebook HDDs Shaolen (seagate i think), but not sure how easy it'd be to just swap out for faster one, or indeed if you can get 7200 RPM notebook HDDs?

 

Yeah I agree. I think they should have made it about 2cm's higher and gone with a full sized hard disc and it would have been much better for it.

You can get 5400rpm hdd's in laptop sizes which will fit in fact the 1.33ghz model has them and is far better for it

 

They are 5400rpm drives Gordy

edit: im talking crap

 

I thought the high end one was shipping with 4200rpm ones?

And the low end with 5400rpm thats what people have been reporting on other forums?

 

Goodness, I take that all back, it is indeed 4200

Could have sworn that I read they all came with 5400s. Crikey...

/hides

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,638,00.html

 

Does anyone know of a way to check without opening up the Mac?

 

Silly that the better model has a worse hdd isn't it

 

Shaolyen - System Profiler -> ATA, grab the HDD model number and shove it into Google

 

Cheers, turned out to be the 4200 RPM model.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you just pop open the Mini and install a faster hard drive and install OS X on that?

edit: nm, checked and it's a 2.5" laptop drive. :/

I wasn't aware that the lower model came with a 5400rpm hdd and higher model with 4200rpm hdd. So which is better: 1.25ghz with 5400rpm hdd or 1.42ghz with 4200rpm hdd?

 

probably the 5400/1.25, since the hard drive will bottleneck it faster than the proc will for most "mini" apps (ie word prossing, etc, things where seek time will be more noticible than processor speed). But I'd say logically get the 1.42 and upgrade it with a 7200rpm drive. Unless the 1.42's heat is the reason there's a 4200rpm instead of 5400, in which case yer screwed. Depends what you're doing I suppose.

 

But the 5200rpm drive - 40gb 1.25 is smaller than the 4200rpm drive - 80gb on the 1.42!

Once you take into account that there will be more data on the same size disc (as I understand it) then there will be about the same speed overall on either of those drives.

As the discs are more compressed, in physical terms, surely a 80gb laptop 4200 drive will be comparable to a larger 3.5 80gb drive? and a 7200rpm drive laptop size would be faster than a desktop one?

Anywho, if that makes no sense, you might get less lag by getting a seagate 100gb 7200rpm laptop drive...

 

I wonder if there'd be heat issues involved with a 7200rpm drive?

 

Well if it was fast to begin with then it's probably not your hd but the problem usually lies within the cache and swap files... Suggest MacJanitor, OnyX, TinkerTool, AppleJack.

Load the OS X cd (on booting hold and press C) and run the system disk checker to fix the broken links and permissions... Kinda like windows defrag...

And no firewire drives are not faster then internal drives... Unless you can prove it.

The Mac Mini is basically getting a laptop in a box, without a screen...

 

Not if you're comparing the same hard drive. But a 7200rpm firewire drive is faster than a 5400rpm internal laptop drive.

 

There shouldn't be, ive got a 7200 RPM HD in my laptop and it works fine.

 

I also read an article which suggests that a Firewire 7200rpm drive gives nearly a 75% increase in performance.

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