Apple Mac mini with a 60GB 7200RPM Drive--How Fast Is It?

The new Apple Mac mini is one terrific entry-level consumer Mac and we have a base 1.25GHz model that came with 256MB RAM and a 4200RPM 40GB hard drive for $499. According to our previous tests, the base 256MB of RAM is perfectly adequate for usual computer use that most price-concious consumers would engage in. It is not necessary to have more RAM unless one is working with large images, large sets of images or large files where lots of disk swapping happens. But what about the hard drive?

The base hard drive in our Mac mini is a 40GB 2.5" Seagate model with an Ultra ATA interface that runs at a slow 4200 RPM. It is a typical mid-to-low range notebook drive. In our previous Mac mini speed test we showed that the performance of the Mac mini's stock drive is about the same as the 4200RPM 80GB drive in our 6 month old 1.5GHz 17" PowerBook G4 and our stock Power Mac G4 Cube's original 5400RPM 20GB 3.5" Western Digital ATA drive.

It's hard for us to call 40GB smallish but it is in the context of today's hard drives. If one is going to download lots of demos, utilities, keep lots of digital pictures and store lots of music files, 40GB can run out. Fortunately, there is a 80GB hard drive upgrade CTO option for a reasonable $50 for those who contemplate keeping such large number of files on their hard drive. It also a 2.5" notebook drive that runs at a slow 4200RPM.

Most desktop drives today are 3.5" models and run at 7200RPM and there are 10,000RPM performance drives available. So an alternative to the 80GB CTO drive is to put the $50 into a huge external 3.5" FireWire/USB drive in a nice looking case like OWC's Mercury Elite Pro that ranges in size up to 400GB for a about $1 per GB. All of these drives run at 7200RPM.

There are 2.5" 7200RPM notebook drives also. We ordered a new 2.5" 60GB Hitachi hard drive that runs at 7200 RPM to replace our PowerBook's now-too-small 20 GB external backup drive. 60GB is the largest 2.5" drive running at 7200RPM that is currently available. But first we tried it in our Mac mini to answer our curiousity of just how fast is it.

We used our unofficial Mac mini "cracking tool," a 4" thin-bladed and beveled putty knife to open our Mac mini. It gets easier every time. Swapping the drives was fairly simple for anyone used to working around inside a computer with small screws. Only #0 and #1 philips screwdrivers are needed, preferably ones with slightly magnetized tips. Three screws and one piece of tape were removed to get the drive assembly off the base/logic board. Three screws (some may have only two) were removed to get the fan out of the way. Four screws and two more pieces of tape were removed that hold the drive to the assembly. The "old" drive was then carefully pried off the ATA connector. The "new" drive was installed by reversing the steps. Here are the details in a PDF file that can be downloaded. OWC has an excellent Mac mini take-apart video in four different file sizes--during re-assembly, don't forget to put the tape back over the wires and especially drive screw hole in the air channel.

We tested the Mac mini with the new fast hard drive installed using our standard set of tests. Some are "canned" benchmark applications and some are so-called "real world" activities that are timed. Each test was repeated three times and the scores or times averaged and rounded to the nearest whole point or second. Here are the results compared with those of the original 4200RPM drive:

The results overall are not surprising. The Xbench hard disc score of 89 is 55% faster for the 7200RPM Hitachi 60GB drive than the stock 4200RPM Seagate 40GB drive. For comparison, our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 gets an Xbench score of 108 and our upgraded Power Mac G4 Cube with a 120GB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM drive gets an even better score of 117.

The Mac mini with the faster drive is faster on the disc-intensive "real world" operations: shutdown, launching Classic Mode, duplicating a 700MB folder of 3600 files and exporting a QuickTime movie to full quality DV are faster respectively by 33%, 19%, 33% and 47%. The only surprise to us is that startup is not any faster.

In summary, the Mac mini is significantly faster with the 7200RPM Hitachi 60GB drive (model 7K60). It will make many operations snappier, more so than by adding additional RAM for most people. However, the cost of the 60GB Hitachi drive with shipping is nearly $200 so we can't really recommend it to the price-conscious consumer, the Mac mini's target market. [Bill Fox]