Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

External Boot Drive for Mac Mini?

D

dreamsandart

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 11, 2004
47
0
Any recommendations for an external boot drive with a Mac Mini?

My thought was to use the firewire port for speed, but it would be nice to leave it open for connecting to my MacBook Pro in disk mode and with a camcorder. I saw a Lacie 2TB raid that uses USB, will this be (too) slower?

I'll be upgrading the 120gb internal drive to 320 or 500 and of course can use that as my 'main' drive, but since it will be sitting, why not just have a larger and more dependable drive as the main one?

Any thoughts?

Thanks
 
If the Mac Mini has an Intel CPU, booting from a USB drive will work, but the transfer speed won't exceed 25-30MB/s, even a 5400RPM internal 2.5" HDD will have better speeds.
I don't know which Mac Mini you have, but FW might be an option, but FW400 has a maximum of 40MB/s and FW800 (on the 2009 Mac Minis) has a maximum of 65MB/s. S0 FW800 might be a good choice, if possible of course.

Also when using FW (400/800), you can daisy chain FW devices (up to 63), as most external HDDs with FW come with 2 ports of the same FW family.

So you can use the FW port of you Mac Mini to connect the external HDD to it, and then user the other free port on the external HDD for connecting it to your MacBook Pro via Target Disk Mode (or via a FW ethernet, like a LAN just with FW as cable and with FW speeds) or the video camera.

3587060147_8e096220f5_o.jpg
 
Yes, I'm talking about the new Mac Mini with the intel processor. The Lacei External drive I looked at has only USB and from what I saw on the packaging looks to have a single USB port (strange in the age) or may be one on the front along with one on the back? The RAID 2tb set-up would be a plus to back up the 1tb main drive of this. Don't think it would be worthwhile to use USB if if slows things down for the main drive.

Maybe I'll have to go with my original idea of up-grading the internal drive and just using the firewire port/connection for external drive and back-up and daisy chain from there with firewire.
 
There are LaCie drives with FW, even the model I took for the "diagram" has FW.

And why should an external HDD have more than one USB port? USB can't daisy chain, so it would be redundant. Maybe a hub would work, but I don't know of any existing ones on external HDDs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back