Speeding up my Mini

[Mr645]

Mini 2.3 i7 server, dual 1TB drives.

Looking through some parts laying around.
I have a WD 1TB Black edition I just put in the OWC USB 3 case. I can use that as my boot drive, guessing even USB 3, that drive will be faster then the internal 5400 RPM 2.5"

I can also strip the two internal drives, RAID 0 and use that and the USB drive as my back up.

Worth the effort? Or a waste of time.

Thanks,
Jon

[gabester]

Waste of time. Get an SSD, or RAM.

Oh, wait, with what you have available, I'd RAID 0 but be aware using the OS to software RAID has a CPU performance hit of something like 10%, so while you'll write data to the combined disks almost twice as fast you'll have a modest CPU performance hit.

Wouldn't think an external drive over USB would be faster than an internal drive unless those internal drives are really low quality. Is that a 3.5" drive? They can be a little faster on large data transfers when the data's written out towards the edge of the drive.

[Mr645]

Thanks. I do have a 60GB SSD handly, not big enough. I am using about 600GB of space, so the right size SSD is not going to be cheap. RAM (4GB) seems to be ok for what I have been doing, but drive performance seems to be pretty slow compared to the Power Mac G5 this Mini replaced. The G5 had two 1TB WD Black drives in RAID 0 array.

[sekker]

I don't understand - replace one of the 1TB drives with the SSD and make that just a boot drive. Store the bulk on the second 1TB drive you left in the mini.

[clay]

or put the SSD in an external case and boot from it, and RAID the 2 internals and you get the best of both worlds

[bik]

sekker wrote:
I don't understand - replace one of the 1TB drives with the SSD and make that just a boot drive. Store the bulk on the second 1TB drive you left in the mini.

:agree:

[Mr645]

Can I install the OS and Application on a 60GB drive? Or install the OS on the 60 SSD and can I install Apps, like Adobe CS6 suite on a different drive?

[clay]

Mr645 wrote:
Can I install the OS and Application on a 60GB drive? Or install the OS on the 60 SSD and can I install Apps, like Adobe CS6 suite on a different drive?

Sure you can...probably the items that need more storage are iTunes library (offload to hard drive), iPhoto library (offload to hard drive), and Movies (ditto). The stuff in your user folder is where the bulk of your files are going to be

For reference, on my 10.8.2 install:
My apps folder right now is 25 GB (there's a bunch of stuff I'd like to remove, but haven't gotten around to it yet)
My System folder is 5.5 GB
My Library folder is 15 GB

[tenders]

All good advice. The question I'm not sure of is whether the SSD will be fastest when installed internally or in the USB3 enclosure.

In my much, much older Mini I was surprised at how fast the SSD was via the internal PATA interface than anything external, but of course this is very different architecture you've got going on.

[gabester]

SATA is faster than USB of any flavor. A drive directly connected to the SATA bus will always be faster.
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