2011 Base Mac Mini Perfomance & upgrade Question

[Wicked1]

Ok, so I just called the local store near me and they have a 2011 Base Mac Mini however I do not want to pay them extra to upgrade the ram to 4GB or 8GB.

2 Questions

How does the Mini perform with 2 GB of ram doing some web browsing, DVD Rips and Encoding, and email?

What is the best Ram to put in the 2011 Base Mini with the i5 2.3 and should I go for 8GB or 4GB.

This mini will be used as a Media Server and some DVD Ripping and Encoding with the Apple USB Superdrive.

How well do the stock 500GB drives perform considering they are 5400 RPM?

 

[AppleDApp]

for ripping I suggest upgrading to 4gb of RAM. You can purchase RAM online for about 40$. Why don't you get the previous generation mac mini? It would probably be cheaper and work just as well for a media center and ripping/encoding. The stock drive works like all other 5400 RPM drives.

Your sig mentions you have a 2009 mac mini. That would do the job just fine. Why do you need the new mini?

this rig seems like it will be accomplishing specific tasks you could use your other mac mini for email.

 

[Bupkus]

I had a 1.83 C2D Mac Mini and just upgraded to the base 2011 model. I haven't upgraded the ram yet, but do say with the 2gb's it runs pretty well as an HTPC....in fact I thought it was going to be crippled, but running Hulu, XBMC, Plex and Boxee is no problem. The only multitasking I did was when I added 150 gigs of music from a USB drive to iTunes and was watching some shows on Hulu and there was no hesitation or anything that indicated that I was short on RAM. I will be going to 8gb, since it is so cheap.

 

[steve knight]

I thought it was sluggish with 2 gigs of memory. mail could be slow and chrome could get slow too. right now I have 5 gigs as I had to split the 8 between two mac mini's. far better performance and I can run audiobook builder in the background rip cd's and still surf without much of an issue.

 

[robo456]

Just remember the new minis don't have an optical drive, so you're going to need to spend more on an external drive. (can you rip off a shared drive?)

--rob

 

[SteveNYC]

Considering that 8GB of RAM can be purchased for $39.99 after a $10 rebate, I would say go for 8GB. That said, I think the system will run well with 4GB.

With respect to the hard drive speed. As a general statement, yes, a 7200RPM hard drive would be faster than a 5400RPM hard drive. But there is always the devil in the details. For example, the new 1TB Western Digital Scorpio Blue is a 5400RPM HDD and it is faster than the 640GB Seagate Momentus or the 500GB Western Digitial Scorpio Black, both of which run at 7200RPM. Why? Because its aerial density is higher, meaning that it puts more data on each platter. So check the specifics.

Good luck.