I wanna buy a Mac Mini but my music collection alone is almost 60gbs. I wanna know if you would recommend buying a usb 2.0 or firewire external hard drive to store it all. I like the hard drive that is mostly designed for the mini but the usb 2.0 worries me as I won't be importing the music onto my internal and will only be running it through the external. Any advice is amazing.
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Mac mini with usb 2.0 external HD
- Thread starter baddestm0nkey
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firewire external. much faster. you would just change your itunes destination and pull from the external. done all the time with minis. apple really short changed us on the hardrives in the minis.
Here we go again. Faster for music?
To the OP....really its just a preference. I used a USB 2.0 external on my mini (for music and storage) and saw ZERO file transfer speed difference between it and the 2 FW drives I also had. Just get whatever you like, whatever is cheap. One bonus though to FW is that it frees up a USB port.
BTW, Ive gone round and round about this issue before. In normal, day to day usage, you WILL NOT see any considerable speed difference from USB2 vs FW. I even have done tests with my FW vs USB2 drives, moving large files and the FW drive only showed marginal difference. And by marginal Im talking a few seconds saved transferring a folder with several gbs of files.
i wasnt saying just for music, because im sure after a while he/she will be storing more than just music on his external. Many have said that firewire is faster in general. videos pictures documents... its all opinions i guess. he asked for that, so i gave it to him.
Thats fine. Im just saying, there seem to be a notion here that FW gives some unbelievably faster transfer rates, and infact it doesnt. Especially when we are talking about small transfers.
