New Mac Mini & Drobo ro Ext. HD FW800

[Wicked1]

Has anyone had any luck with not using an Internal Hard Drive and using either a Drobo or external drive to run OSX? I was thinking of getting a new HD that runs FW800 or using my Drobo to creat a partition to load Mac OSX on and run the OS from an external HD.

The Reason I am even trying this, is because the Mini uses Laptop drives with less specs then my External Seagate 500GB 7200RPM with 16 MB of Cache, also 3.5" drives seem to run quicker then even the fastest 2.5" drives.

I hope somone got this working before I waste Saturday trying this out?


Thanks

 

[five04]

I'm actually in the same boat. External drives are pretty cheap considering their massive size and performance. With my Mac mini, I was thinking about booting only from a large 1TB+ drive rather than spending the same amount of money on a 500GB internal drive. If anybody knows if this is actually faster I'd love to hear.

 

[JustGretchen]

You can boot and run from FW800 no problem.

If you think about it, even though the purpose of SATA is to be able to go really fast from a data transfer stand point, hard drives aren't able to write remotely close to the top end of SATA data transfer.

I run a 1tb WD Studio w/ FW800 on my mini, and I have done boots off it, seems to work well. I was able to score that drive from newegg for 149 which was the cheapest I've seen it anywhere so far.