SSD and other drives explained?

[iMas70]

I see a lot of threads about people upgrading or ordering their Minis with an SSD. I generally have an idea what they do (booting and launching apps happens faster). For general use, is this worth it or is it mainly beneficial for "power users"?

I used to see 7200 RPM drives offered and now Apple just offers 5400. Yes, faster is better but again, will the difference be noticeable during normal use?

Finally, I believe I've seen other hard drive upgrades mentioned here so if anyone wants to add info about them that would be great! I'm pretty good with iDevices but learning about these.

Thanks!

 

[jsw]

Whether or not it is worth it is a financial decision you need to make, but an SSD does make a profound difference in the speed of your system. Case in point: I have a late 2008 Mac mini at work. When I added an SSD, boot times and compile times for my code were literally halved. Overall, day-to-day stuff (such as launching apps and opening files) is noticeably faster as well.

So... any user will notice an improvement, and the improvement will be significant compared to a 5400rpm drive.

However, there's nothing you can do with an SSD that you cannot do with a rotating disk drive. It'll just be slower. However, if you get a rotating disk drive, you won't really notice it's slow; you'd just notice when compared to an SSD.

 

[TedM]

I have an SSD on my home computer and it is noticeably faster. But its prior speed before I replaced it was pretty good as well. Also SSDs are really expensive... how much is the one in the mini?

 

[iMas70]

256GB Solid State Drive [Add $300.00]

 

[dasx]

Well. Let's put it this way. If I were to buy a computer which has very low end components and I can only choose one upgrade... I'd go for the SSD. My mom has a 5 year old Dell Inspiron which was already a low level model when she bought it. (She didn't need more). Her drive died some weeks ago and just sticking in an SSD was like dealing with a whole new computer.

Impossible to achieve with any other single upgrade.