IDE vs FIREWIRE

I believe the mini has an Ultra ATA hard drive, which in theory tops out at 133 megabytes per second. Firewire (the original, not firewire 800) transfers at 400 megabits per second, which works out to 50 megabytes per second. So in theory, the internal IDE-connected drive should be faster.

I did do some benchmarking with the mini. I was getting
about ~29.6 Mbyte/sec with my builtin drive. On my
7200RPM firewire drive, I was able to get around
35.9Mbyte/sec. That's pretty much fills the FW pipe.
Mind you, my builtin drive isn't 7200RPM. I would
be interested in hearing the results from others. My
guess is 7200RPM internal drive would be as fast, if
not, faster than the firewire.
--
Jim

Justin Nightingale...

It much depends on either counterparts, the built in IDE Controler or the FW Bridge. Next kicks in the other parameters such as HD specs and so on.

Now the IDE bus is more than likely shared with the Optical Drive on a Mac mini. Internal 2.5" form factor HD do not seem as fast as the 3.5" HDs. As you may see what I am driving at, there is some trivial bottlenecks here.

Next is that FW is processor direct, so it can cut out some of the bottlenecks as long as the 3.5" HD is concerned. Dropping down to a 2.5" HD reduces any speed advantages again.

So my conclusion as long as a Good FW based on an IDE 3.5" HD it should the tops of the speed race. Next probably would be a near toss up but more favorable FW /2.5".

Ron,

I agree. The nice thing about the internal drive is
that you don't need another piece hanging off
the mac. I ended up getting a mini stack external
enclosure which matched the mini so it looks nice
as well. Also, the 2.5" does not have the capacity
found on 3.5" drives.

My benchmark test was rather basic -- more like
beauty contest numbers. I timed how long it would
take to write 4G of fixed blocks. Not a realistic
test. In addition, the DVD drive was not active at
the time sp there was no bus contention.
--
Jim