Mac Mini Drive Replacement Option(s)

After reading the FAQ it seems that this drive is nothing more than an SSD and an HHD in one enclosure. What confuses me is that it comes with the HHD ‘locked’ until the user installs WD software to unlock it. At that point I’d run away because I don’t trust WD software or support.

It's interesting looking, but I'd agree with dwb. WD were the guys that had drivers for their external drives that wiped the drives clean once Mavericks came out (ouch!!) because of some bug. They worked around it and fixed it, but reliance on third party software can be tricky.

I have several Mac Mini's (2010, 2012) and I can highly recommend the Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm drives. They will give you a pretty good boost over the stock 5400rpm drive, if that is all your budget can support.

However for just a little more, you can have a really fast setup by installing a small SSD (120GB or 240GB) into the lower bay where the stock HDD is and move your stock HDD to the upper bay using OWCs Data Doubler Kit.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DDMM10CL0GBO/

Additionally, after having really good luck with PNY camera cards and flash drives, I decided to go with their 240GB SSD's in my Mac Mini's. What the heck' 1) there pricing is pretty good, and 2) they're made in the good old USA.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?id=pcat17071&nrp=15&cp=1&sp=-bestsell ingsort%20skuidsaas&seeAll=&_dyncharset=…

I'm totally sold on the dual SSD/HDD setup, because now my Mac Mini's start up in 7 to 8 seconds (with OS X and App's) on the SSD's and I never gets a spinning wheel when accessing my huge (iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie) Libraries stored on the HDD's.

That type of drive can apparently be set up as a Fusion drive, but like some of the others have posted, it's reliant on WD's drivers. Drivers have a sneaky habit of being problematic when OS versions change.

I agree with others here about WD drivers/apps, but I would also avoid

any other manufacturers that supply/require drivers and "helper apps".

den.ted pointed out the data doubler at OWC, but in addition, they have some

7200 RPM HDDs on sale as well (HGST).

I'd second the Hitachi 7200RPM drive, just make sure that you get one of the new types with AF format - the throughput is a lot faster.

Apparently the WD can actually be configured as a Fusion drive if interested, but like the others I'd be wary of the fact it needs drivers and needs to be "unlocked" (I don't even really get that requirement).

den.thed wrote: I have several Mac Mini's (2010, 2012) and I can highly recommend the Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm drives.

Are those Travelstars the "green" power saving type? If so, they will rather quickly accumulate load cycles, like park the heads every ten or so seconds, and easily reach their maximum before you realize it. I bought one for my Mini 2010, and it was up to over 2,000 load cycles after only a few days. Fortunately found hdapm, which put a stop to that nonsense. Might save a bit of battery power in a laptop, but a horrible idea for a desktop drive.

http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/

http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/usage.html

Should work fine in 10.10.

I'm hearing good things about this Seagate Hybrid

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178340

WZZZ wrote:

Are those Travelstars the "green" power saving type? If so, they will rather quickly accumulate load cycles, like park the heads every ten or so seconds, and easily reach their maximum before you realize it.

Not sure what your problem is or was, but I have two 7K500's and a 7K750 that have been in service nearly everyday for over three years now.

WZZZ also wrote:

Might save a bit of battery power in a laptop, but a horrible idea for a desktop drive.

Not true, they make great inexpensive replacement options for any system that has a 5400rpm HD.

If you don't have it already, get smartmontools, which can be installed from homebrew (http://brew.sh/), then just type in “brew install smartmontools,” which will install it. Look at the drive attributes by typing into Terminal "smartctl -s on -a diskname" (e.g. disk0s3--get disk name from diskutil list). Not sure about the current version of SmartReporter (trial), but the older ones will show you the attributes also.

The load cycle count on my 5 1/2 year old iMac WD drive is around 9,000. The load cycle count on the Travelstar after only six days was up to over 2,000. The max for the Travelstar I installed was 600,000, which may sound like a lot, but at that rate I would easily have reached that in a year or two. If your Travelstar is "green," in Hitachi speak, "power saving mode," I would imagine that you are close to or over whatever the max is for yours by now.

Just to be clear, although I'm sure you must know this: "attributes" are S.M.A.R.T attributes.

Sorry but, I'll have to pass on whole homebrew deal because I don't do any terminal or third party hacking.

Besides:

1. those drives only cycle down when I sleep or shutdown the Mini's and

2. having multiple backups, I could really care less about their cycle count.

Sorry to butt in, but I think he's referring to the newer AF formatted Hitachi's with a much higher areal density and usually at least a 32MB buffer. Those drives are low cost and FAAAAAST as far as spinners are concerned. Excellent drives. I've got three of them and wouldn't hesitate to buy more, especially for a Fusion setup.

My experience with "green" drives is that they're fine for a backup drive, but if you want them for a boot drive, forget it. I've got one of those WD "green" drives and it's about as fast as a turtle. They aren't designed to be performance drives, they're designed to save energy (at the expense of speed). They fall asleep and park heads at too often and, at least on the WDs, the variable spin rate is no asset.

WD now owns Hitachi, but Hitachi is still almost functioning as a standalone company.

I like some of the stuff WD and Hitachi are doing, especially coupling SSDs with drives. It seems some traditional HD manufacturers are almost assuming all they're good for any more is as backup units, but client with "big data" are still sticking to hard drives, not SSDs.

Just opinions…be nice! 😉

Three remarks:

1. Do not install Fusion Drive if ever possible. Arguments for this in a lot of threads here.

2. WD drives, especially the Black, are very good drives. I use several in Windows PCs that supervise a large technical installation.

3. In macs do not use the WD software when it is new. Horrible experiences everywhere. After a few years I would try and use it perhaps. Drives that need special drivers and/or special software should be banned from Macs.

4. In a mac all non Apple drives better be formatted first before thinking about putting OS or software on it. This is not psossible with this Black combi drive as far as I gather from the supplier, because you need the special software that is on it.

5. The Acronis proposal for a clone works well in a Windows environment (physical bit per bit on the disk), I would never dare using it in OSX.

My thoughts: keep away from it in a mac environment.

Lex

PS: a 7200RPM disk with a 8GB buffer would do great here I suppose.

I've been using a Fusion Drive since Mountain Lion. I've had no problems with it. My only advise is to treat it like a striped RAID unit and keep good backups. If one part fails or there are problems for some reason there's no easy or straight forward way to tell which file was on which disk at which time.

If the customer needs/wants his optical in place then the data doubler won't work because it's just an adapter that fits an SSD or HDD into the OD slot. If he can't/won't afford a big SSD I'd consider a real hybrid, just make sure it's a newer one with a 7200RPM spindle speed. For regular hard drives, the Hitachi 2.5" drives using 32MB buffers and AF format at 7200RPM although not as fast as a hybrid are fast for hard drives and they're cheap.

This particular model is a good one:

HTS725050A7E630

Hitachi makes a lot of drives. You'll need to read the specs. Watch out for anything that has words emphasized like "energy saver" , "green", "low power", "variable speed", or "variable sector" because they're usually intended for very low power consumption in laptops at the expense of speed. Most seem designed to be put into backup or auxiliary units.