7200 RPM HDD upgrade?

[robisc]

Does anyone know what the real speed difference it would make to upgrade the 4200 RPM HDD in my Mac Mini to a 7200 RPM drive, I already have 1GB RAM and have seen huge differences in disk speed benchmarks using XBench on sites like Xlr8yourmac but numbers don?t necessarily mean anything to me in this case, what real world ?seat of the pants? difference could I expect if I make this upgrade? Does anyone have any experience doing this with their Mini? Would it be worth the money ?

 

[jdogg707]

In general, moving to faster hard drive, especially the difference between 4200RPM and 7200RPM, will make a big difference in things like boot times, program load times, and other hard drive driven tasks. If you want snappier performance, it would be worth it.

 

[robisc]

Thanks for the reply and I do understand that HDD speed increases typically mean an overall system performance increase, but I guess what I'm really looking for (and this may not be the best forum) is for someone who has done this upgrade and what their opinion is. FWIW in one of my latest PCs I built I put in a Raptor SATA drive after hearing all of all these ?amazing? advantages and I have to say I was really disappointed, not that it is slow but for the major difference in $$ there seems to be no ?real world? speed increases to me when just comparing to a good 7200 RPM 8MB cache HDD, so I just don?t want to go through this with this little Mac, because these fast laptop HDDs are expensive.

 

[SNM]

Raptors are only good for very specific uses (lots of random accesses, mostly), whereas a 7200rpm drive is much much faster than a 4200 for pretty nearly all purposes.
Rather than asking if you'll see a performance boost, ask yourself if your Mini's taking too long to load things. If it is, upgrade. If you just wish you could do better gaming on it, it's not gonna help.

 

[MrChad]

Wouldn't heat be an issue with a 7200 RPM drive in such a small form factor case?

 

[robisc]

Wouldn't heat be an issue with a 7200 RPM drive in such a small form factor case?

That's a good point, I know that some have done it and there seems to be no short term effects but who knows about the long term, but then again, how long do we keep and use PCs these days anyways?

 

[sparkyclarky]

Originally posted by: robisc

Wouldn't heat be an issue with a 7200 RPM drive in such a small form factor case?

That's a good point, I know that some have done it and there seems to be no short term effects but who knows about the long term, but then again, how long do we keep and use PCs these days anyways?

It won't be an issue, as that is a 7200 RPM laptop drive being used, and compared to many laptops the mini interior is downright roomy.

As far as the OP is concerned, it will be an improvement, but probably not quite the same gain you see with the same jump in a windows machine. The reason being that OSX does very efficient caching, so HD access isn't quite as key for general system snapiness as it is in windows. But it will undoubtedly make a difference.

 

[robisc]

I finally answered my original question in my post. I did some benchmarking and ?seat of the pants? testing and found at that as expected, the 4200 RPM HDD in my Mac Mini with 1.42 GHz and 1GB RAM IS the performance limiter. This machine runs Tiger and it benchmarked at around 131 with XBench, so before I go the route of buying an expensive laptop 7200RPM platter HDD and installing it I thought I would try a 3.5 inch IDE 80GB Maxtor 7200 RPM with 8MB cache, I put this in an external Firewire case. I used Super Duper since Carbon Copy Cloner doesn't work in Tiger yet to clone the internal drive to the external one and make it bootable, and after rebooting to the Firewire drive I have to say wow, the performance increase is amazing, much more noticeable than even when increasing the RAM from 256MB to 1GB which I did early on. Everything is much faster, including opening apps and menus. So next I ran XBench and the new score is 151, with all the disk tests at least doubling what they were originally. So this is just my experience on a HDD upgrade in a Mac Mini and now I wish there were an option like the MiniMate without a HDD, so I could add my own. I am not sure even if I did crack the case open and add a faster laptop drive whether or not the performance could equal a good 3.5 inch drive across Firewire?

 

[Jeff7]

Yes, moving from 4200 to 7200 will make a big difference. You'll get a very noticable difference going from 5400 to 7200. I'm seriously considering upgrading my laptop to 5400 or 7200 if I can afford the latter, because going from a RAID 5 system with 4 7200rpm drives, then working on a 4200rpm single drive system....just feels like I'm using floppy disks to load Windows.