Booting from a FW external drive?

[McGilli]

I'd be curious to hear from people who are booting from FW800



Would booting from FW800 be faster than using the stock 5400rpm hdd inside the Mini?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Not really, as 5.400 RPM HDDs, even the 2.5" S-ATA ones offer between 70 to 80 MB/s (sometimes even more, if it is more dense/has bigger capacity), and Firewire 800 offers 65 to 75 MB/s.

You can use the following applications to benchmark the speed of your internal HDD:

• AJA System Test
• Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
• Xbench

 

[dolphin842]

You can get a speed boost by keeping os x on the internal drive and putting your user account on an external drive, or vice versa. I'm currently booting from an SSD connected via FW800 and it works fine.