On Jan 23, 2011, at 9:51 AM, iJohn wrote:
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.
What? Why are you "guessing"? These are measurable "facts". "Guessing"
about things isn't acceptable. Either you know some factual
information or factual reasoning about a topic, or you don't. In this
case, YOU DON'T, so you shouldn't have posted.
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.
A 7,200 RPM HD is DEFINITELY faster in a FW400 enclosure than either a
5,400 RPM or 4,200 RPM. Have you ever even booted from Firewire on a
daily basis? Have you made measurements? Have you streamed video off a
Firewire enclosure? Obviously your experience is limited.
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.
BASED UPON WHAT FACTS? In my experience MEASURING the difference in
speed, the difference is LARGE and EASY to "tell the difference
between".
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.
It's the HD ITSELF that's the limiting factor here, NOT the Firewire
connection. Any gain you make to the HD will transfer directly,
arithmetically to the Mini's HD performance.
===================================================
On Jan 23, 2011, at 10:22 AM, John Carmonne wrote:
OK then let me ask is the internal drive Bus 167 speed going to be
faster than the same drive connected to the FireWire 400?
A 2.5" HD connected to the internal ATA bus is going to be slightly
faster than any HD connected via Firewire 400, but if the internal
2.5" HD is the standard OEM 5,400 RPM and the external FW400 is a 3.5"
7,200 RPM the difference will be minimalized substantially. The
fastest you can achieve will be a SSD connected to the internal ATA;
followed by a 7,200RPM 2.5" or 5,400RPM 2.5" connected to the internal
ATA; followed by a 7,200RPM 3.5" connected via Firewire 400, and then
any slower HDs connected via FW400.
And does that relate to overall performance of my G4 PPC Mac Mini
1.25?
The best thing you can do to your 1.25GHz Mini for performance is to
overclock it to 1.42GHz. It's a simple overclock IF you can see well,
the resistors are TINY. I never soldered mine, they were too small for
my soldering ability. Instead, to remove one I cut the solder with an
exacto knife (any tiny sharp knife or razor blade might work?), and to
add one I used conductive circuit paint using a toothpick. It's a free
15% speed gain with no downside unless you screw-up and botch the job.
As Newertech and several other companies noticed, there isn't much
downside to booting a PPC Mini from a 3.5" 7,200RPM HD instead of the
2.5" 5,400 RPM OEM drive, and the proliferation of MiniStack
enclosures is a testament to that concept. I've been using my Mini as
a media-center computer and I'm trying to squeeze every last bit of
performance from it, so I boot from a small internal 2.5" 7,200 RPM
drive and use a 1 TB Apple Time Capsule for media storage, but this
isn't much better than booting from a MiniStack or any good Firewire
enclosure with a modern 3.5" HD. Note, there is NO difference in speed
between a 3.5" ATA133/150 HD and a 3.5" SATA HD inside a FW400
enclosure. If an SATA HD & enclosure are cheaper, that's the best
deal, but if you have an older ATA 7,200 RPM HD & enclosure it should
be identical in performance. There are some Firewire 400 enclosures
with poor performance chipsets, but these are rare in more modern
enclosures. Definitely avoid anything by GeneSys Logic which will NOT
work. Oxford is best, and anything by a HD manufacturer is good.
The 1.25 Mini is going to be a little bit too slow to play modern HD
video smoothly, the bottleneck isn't the HD, it's the Radeon 9200
video which unfortunately can't be upgraded at all, and severely
limits these older PPC Minis. I suspect slower G4 PowerMacs with
better video cards can outperform these G4 Minis. About the only thing
you can do to get better video card performance is limit the
resolution to something smaller. Unfortunately on my HDTV the only
proportional resolution available is the highest resolution 1,920x1080
which kills the video performance and renders HD quality video to a
stuttering mess. Any lower resolution would increase performance, but
in my case, such isn't possible. Tiger 10.4 is about 15-20% faster on
the G4 Mini than Leopard 10.5; but they offer DIFFERENT sets of
resolution/refresh rates, so that's something to consider also if
you're using the Mini with a HDTV as a display.
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