Apparently, an external FireWire hard disk beats an IDE-connected notebook drive, or at least the 4200RPM ones. So, if you have a Mac mini and want to make it faster, your best advice is to wipe the internal hard disk and boot it off an external 3.5" drive in a FireWire enclosure; performance will then improve steeply.

Of course, the same considerations come into play for laptops, though one obviously wouldn't want to lug around an external FireWire drive enclosure with one's shiny new PowerBook. Though the author of the article reports good results from swapping his PowerBook's drive for a 7200RPM notebook drive. (Whether or not this is a good idea would depend on how much extra heat a faster drive generates, and what tolerance the design of the laptop in question has for hotter-running hard drives.)

Posted by: mihaly | http:// | Fri May 20 06:47:23 2005

Hack-a-day mentioned something about building a small add-on device that does this. Sorry I don't have the link handy, but maybe I'm thinking of soemthing else.

try http:/www.hackaday.com search for macintosh products.

Posted by: mihaly | http:// | Fri May 20 06:48:00 2005

oops http://www.hackaday.com

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