Enterprise IT

• Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog.
• Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into Vista? – A group post for Gestalt IT suggesting that VMware’s tiered licensing strategy for the vSphere 4 family might cause anguish for customers
• Infosmack Episode 2 – EMC, David Donatelli and Non-Compete Agreements – I joined the StorageMonkeys Infosmack podcast to discuss EMC, Dave Donatelli, and con-compete agreements with Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley of 3Par and StorageRap, and Tony Asaro of the INI Group
• IT utilities, the biggest game in town – Chris Mellor of The Register suggests that the biggest IT vendors are positioning to lock up the IT market.
• The Non-Compete Clause Debate….. - Steve Duplessie muses on the pros and cons of non-compete agreements and what they mean for the IT industry
• Who’s the pot & who’s the kettle? - W. Curtis Preston reacts to the skirmishes between Tony Asaro and the EMC bloggers
• The Only VMware-certified NAS in its Category: Why the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200r Will Resonate with Small Businesses - Jerome Wendt expands on the Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200r
• Don’t focus too much on costs, cloud computing is about business agility - CapGemini reminds us that cloud computing isn’t just about reducing costs
• What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing - The Google Enterprise blog lays down some of the hard facts about building a cloud on your own
• Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System - Chris Evans provides one of the best reviews yet of Sun’s Amber Road open source-based storage systems
• Brocade Pokes Cisco in the Eye, Switches for IBM - A great headline and solid reporting by Om Malik on one of the first reactions to Cisco UCS
• TheInfoPro: Analysis or Marketing? - StorageMonkeys continues their probing of the storage analyst community
• A “Tweeterview” with Stephen Foskett, Nirvanix Consulting Director - Sunshine interviews me about Nirvanix, storage, and my new role

Apple

• Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail – A deep, long post on GMail, IMAP, Mac OS X Mail, and how to get all three to play nicely together.
• Monitor Your Mac Remotely With iStat for iPhone - I love iStat for Mac OS X and the iPhone and had been meaning to write a review. This AppleBlog post is just about what I might have written!

Life

• There Goes Chrysler – NPR’s awesome Planet Money blog reported the breaking news of Chrysler’s bankruptcy
• The Venture Capital Math Problem and The Venture Capital Math Problem (continued) – Fred Wilson points out that there can be no such thing as unlimited venture capital
• Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable? – Has pervasive wireless Ethernet made wired ports unnecessary?
• Interview with Micah Baldwin, Father of FollowFriday – Micah calls me out as someone who is doing interesting things on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
This post was categorized as Everything. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The Tortoise and the Hare: Upgrading my new Mac Mini's hard drive and RAM made all the difference!

It may seem odd to buy a computer intending to upgrade it right out of the box, but so it was with me when I snapped up a new 2009 Nvidia-powered Mac Mini. I had been waiting for Apple to update the aged Mini line, saving up my pennies, but the out-of-box specs for RAM and hard drive space were underwhelming.

Out-Of-Box Upgrade

Unlike the old Mini, where the $799 model netted a SuperDrive as well as additional memory and disk, the new Mini’s $200 upmarket model was seriously overpriced. So I decided to pick up a base model and upgrade it myself right away.

Now that my upgrade is complete, I’m pleased to say that my Mac Mini is a whole new animal! Where the spec base Mini was sluggish, exhausting its meager 1 GB of RAM and swapping to a crazy slow hard drive, my Mini is now snappy and quick. Launching iTunes (with 13,000 songs) took upwards of 30 seconds before, but the song list is now visible before the dock icon bounces twice!

Desktop computer performance is a product of four variables:

1. CPU speed
2. RAM capacity
3. Hard drive performance
4. Graphics capabilities

Other things matter a great deal, but only these four can be changed in a given system. In other words, although the chipset, memory speed, and system bus all have a massive impact on overall performance, you can’t swap these things out! The majority of computers are limited to upgrades in the four areas listed (CPU, RAM, hard drive, graphics), and each must be balanced for satisfying system performance.

Apple designed the Mac Mini as an integrated unit, however, so the graphics and CPU are not upgradable. But these are the system’s strong suits: The Nvidia 9400M chipset gives solid graphics performance, matching or beating the integrated Nvidia 8600M GT graphics in my late-2007 MacBook Pro, and the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU is easily quick enough for general computing tasks. Frustratingly, Apple ships the Mac Mini with inadequate RAM and a very, very slow disk. So upgrading both is a sure-fire way to an excellent system!

Good Memories

Update: The 2009 Mac Minis can now accept 8 GB of RAM!

Killer Storage

The Nvidia chipset is up to date as far as RAM goes. The Mini uses fast 1,066 MHz DDR3-8500 memory and has two SO-DIMM slots. These chips are still hard to find in stores (Fry’s doesn’t carry them!) but they aren’t expensive. Thankfully, rather than filling up both slots with useless 512 MB parts, Apple uses a single 1 GB SO-DIMM in base Minis. I was lucky enough to find another Mini upgrader on Twitter who sent me his leftover RAM for the cost of shipping after taking his Mac all the way to 4 GB (thanks, Joe!) and I bet that most folks could do the same. Otherwise, Other World Computing sells leftover 1 GB DDR3-8500 SO-DIMMs from aluminum MacBooks and Mac Minis for just $12.95! They also have upgrade instructions.

The new Mac Mini performs well in CPU and RAM tests, but 1 GB is insufficient and upgrading to 2 GB gives a noticeable boost

As of Friday, my Mini was rocking 2 GB of RAM, enough for general desktop computing. One side benefit of upgrading was graphics performance: The Mini will use 256 MB of system RAM as a frame buffer if at least 2 GB of RAM is installed, speeding up user interface windowing operations by about 20%, according to Xbench. Overall memory performance also improved with two SO-DIMMs installed, with streaming operations up by 20% to 25%.

Driving It Home

The Mini’s hard drive performance was especially disappointing. The stock 120 GB Hitachi TravelStar 5K320 was a special Apple OEM unit with a single platter and 8 MB of cache. Its slow 1.5 Gb SATA interface wasn’t the bottleneck, though – this drive just poked along, maxing out at about 35 MB/s in sequential operations. This compares favorably to previous-generation drives, but can’t hold a candle to the latest disk drive mechanisms. Apple’s upgrade option for the new Mac Mini is a 320 GB 2-platter version of this same drive. I expect it will perform only slightly better than the 120 GB unit. The stock 320 GB drive seems to perform much, much better than the 120 GB unit in sequential operations!

I decided to upgrade my Mini to a 7200 rpm high-performance drive, and my research led me to Hitachi’s 7k320 series. With just two platters, this 9.5 mm high drive unit remains slim enough for the Mini (or any laptop), and the power specs look great! Hitachi claims only a half-Watt difference between the 7k320 and miserly 5k320 in spin-up and negligible differences in most other operations. Comparison tests showed that the Hitachi was a solid performer against competing offerings from Western Digital, Seagate, and Samsung, and ZipZoomFly listed the 320 GB drive for just $59 after rebate!

The 7200 rpm Hitachi is almost twice as fast as the stock Mac Mini hard disk in random I/O operation

I couldn’t be happier with the 7200 rpm Hitachi drive’s performance. It blows away the stock drive, delivering 32 MB/s in large random write operations, and even beats the solid 5400 rpm Western Digital Scorpio Blue drive I use in my MacBook Pro.

The 7200 rpm Hitachi is easily the fastest drive I've tested in sequential reads and writes

The new Hitachi blows everything else away in sequential operations, too. It delivers a solid 80 MB/s while reading and writing large files while the stock unit could barely reach 35 MB/s! These differences are magnified by the 7k320′s large 16 MB cache, which makes the most of its 3 Gb SATA interface.

Although it doesn’t have to conserve battery power like a laptop, heat is a major concern in a small computer like a Mac Mini, and disk drive power requirements translate directly into heat generation. It turns out that the Mini has such an excellent cooling system that I thought Bjango’s iStat Server was broken: It almost always reported 1,500 rpm fan speed and 120-130° F temperatures. Under sustained load, the Mini’s fan never reached 2,000 rpm and no sensor reported greater than 150° F. The 7200 rpm Hitachi drive has had no impact on in-box temperature or noise levels.

The Mac Mini: Transformed!

Apple delivered a solidly-designed general-purpose desktop computer with the new 2009 Mac Mini, but crippled its performance with too little RAM and a too-slow hard drive. In short, Apple failed to balance the four key pillars of computer performance!

The relatively simple task of upgrading the RAM and hard disk drive transforms the Mac Mini: In normal operations, the upgraded Mini is easily two or three times as responsive as the stock machine! My total cost (for the Mini, the RAM, and the hard drive) was $701. Apple’s $799 2 GB RAM/320 GB disk Mac Mini may look similar on paper, but it won’t touch mine in terms of disk performance. I could have gone all the way to 4 GB of RAM for less than the remaining $98 price difference.

One final word: Apple assured MacWorld that they will continue to honor their warranty on upgraded machines as long as nothing is damaged in the process. The Mac Mini is not that difficult to work on, as long as you have proper tools. Use a static strap, be careful with internal the wires and connectors, and take your time. Once upgraded, the Mac Mini is a satisfying desktop or home server.

Interested in building a home server with Apple’s Mac Mini? Watch my blog over the coming months for detailed reports like this one covering setting up iTunes for whole-house audio, integrating Roku’s SoundBridge music systems, serving video to a TiVo, and configuring Mac OS X as a home server. I’ll also be experimenting with Microsoft’s Windows Home Server and VMware ESX on the new Mini!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Upgrades Give New Mac Mini a Whole New Attitude
This post was categorized as Apple, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.