On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 3:36 PM, John Carmonne <carmo...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> If I use an external 3.5 7200 RPM via Firewire 400 will I gain speed over the 
> internal HDD 4200 RPM in my Mac Mini?
>

That's a hard one to guess at. But my guess would be no, I don't think
you'd see a gain. Or if there was one, it would not be as large as you
hoped. When you connect via Firewire 400 you will never be able to
move data faster than Firewire 400's 400Mbps bus speed. I suppose it's
possible that a 7200 RPM drive would still appear to perform faster
than an internal 4200 RPM, but I wouldn't count on it.

More to the point, I feel fairly confident that you would not really
be able to tell the difference between a (recent) SATA 5400 versus
7200 when connected via Firewire 400. In other words, if you're going
to go with a Firewire 400 external drive I'd suggest going with a 5400
drive and save a few bucks. With the recent improvements in platter
bit densities over the last year or two, the throughput of 5400 drives
has increased noticeably. The difference between 5400 and 7200 is not
as noticeable especially when you put that 400 Mbps cap on the drive
throughput.

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 4:28 PM, John Carmonne <carmo...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> Newegg has a large selection of them including large accompanying prices.
>  http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008120%20600038505&IsNodeId=1&name=PATA
>

Anyone care to do the math on what percentage of the current market
price of a PPC Mac Mini those PATA SDDs might be?  ;-)

It is NOT how fast any particular component of a system may be which
determines the performance of a system. It's the sum of all the
components ... the system itself ... and how they are used ... the
applications and OS. In my opinion buying an SSD for a PPC Mini is
just throwing money away. If you can afford to throw money at an SSD
you'd probably get more bang for your buck by upgrading to a later,
Intel version of the Mac Mini. But to each their own ...

-irrational john

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