Speeding up my Mini

[hal]

booting from USB3 will not be faster - usb seems to max out at about 80MB/s - one 5400rpm 2.5" drive should be able to do that easily. RAID the two internal drives (if they aren't already) to a single 1TB volume. That'll make for a decently fast boot drive.

I assume you've moved off the 2GB RAM base already...

[MrNoBody]

More reference:
10.8.2 80GB SSD has 40GB used including the Applications & Developer folders!
The Users folder on a 1TB HDD is now at 70GB.

[Mr645]

Thank to all who replied of course. The SSD may come next week, just need the time to deal; with the install.

But in the mean time testing the USB 3 housed WD Black 7200RPM drive against the internal drives.

In random read tests, the USB 3 set up is twice as fast, but in all other things, it's a draw, so my conclusion is that USB is USB, still not great for mass storage.

[WI Boilermaker]

Okay, the Late 2012 Mac mini 2.3GHz i7...
The internal SATA bus is 6Gb/s while USB 3.0 is 5Gb/s. So a 6G SSD running internally is going to move most data at about 570-580MB/s, via USB 3.0 at around 480MB/s. Hal's figure of 80MB/s would be just about right for a spinning hard drive.
You need to look at the least common denominator here. Is it the bus, or is it the drive.
I would go with a small SSD as the boot and applications drive and let the User folder reside on the hard drive. This is what I have done with my Mac mini 3,1 and it is incredibly fast!

[Mr645]

The 1TB Black drive took a big performance hit going from an internal SATA connection in a Power Mac G5, when moved to an external USB 3.0 housing.

I striped the two internal 5400 RPM stock drives and cloning the data back to that now. One issue, you cannot partition a RAID 0 array to make the recovery partition, so that part will remain on the external drive, along with my back up scheme.

[Chakravartin]

With an SSD handy, and assuming that I have a good backup from the Mini, I'd replace one of those internal HDs and make a Fusion drive.

[Black]

Betcha booting from the SSD even on external USB3 blows the Black out of the water and you realize it's not the bus.
I have OS, apps, and user folder on my boot SSDs but the larger sub-folders are aliased to their locations on HDD. Takes about 40 GB. My SSDs are 120s so I had room to burn and placed a few other things on them for speed-- EyeTV cache, Thunderbird mailboxes.
I think you're going to be ordering a larger SSD very soon once you see how it is.

[C(-)ris]

Mr645 wrote:
The 1TB Black drive took a big performance hit going from an internal SATA connection in a Power Mac G5, when moved to an external USB 3.0 housing.

I striped the two internal 5400 RPM stock drives and cloning the data back to that now. One issue, you cannot partition a RAID 0 array to make the recovery partition, so that part will remain on the external drive, along with my back up scheme.

G5s only have USB 2.0.

[Mr645]

It was inside, SATA in the G5.

Ok, tests stock vs RAID 0

STOCK 1TB DRIVE:
Sequential 117.78
Uncached Write 132.85 81.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 130.17 73.65 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.11 26.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 128.57 64.62 MB/sec [256K blocks]


Random 38.63
Uncached Write 1.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 36.83 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 20.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]

TWO STOCK DRIVES RAID 0
Sequential 164.77
Uncached Write 294.36 180.73 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 231.96 131.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 78.06 22.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 266.15 133.77 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 68.73
Uncached Write 32.38 3.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 176.51 56.51 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.67 0.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 121.11 22.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[sekker]

SSD will add even more speed!