As a followup to my Mac Mini 2010 Hard Drive Speed rant, I went to the Apple Store today to check what's up with the Mac Mini 2011...
Apparently, the Nvidia chipset has been replaced with an Intel chipset that is now capable of 6 Gigabit/second link speeds... and the entry level drive is now capable of 3 Gbps link speeds...
That is definitely not an improvement over last year's model.
However, why still not a 6 Gbps drive? Because the drives are not fast enough to saturate a 3 Gbps link? My bet is that 6 Gbps would definitely make sense with SSD.
The Apple Store had no 7200 rpm or SSD Mac Mini on display. So, I enquired by the Apple Store employees... who had to ask their tech guru... who said that the 7200 rm drives are 3 Gbps also and that the SSD drives are 3 Gbps also. Since the iMac with a 7200 rpm drive is at 3 Gbps and that the Mac Mini with SSD is also at 3 Gbps, I will take their word for it: Apple just won't give you drives that can communicate any faster than 3 Gbps! :/ (and they won't sell them to you either...)
So... if you'd actually want top performance, you'd have to go for aftermarket solutions...
OWC blogged about a test of their OWC 6G SSD drives in the 2011 Mac Mini.
The numbers look good. Especially compared to the stock 5400 rpm drive and even to the Apple SSD drive. I still wish they had tested performance against their own OWC 3G SSD drives.
I just ordered one of these 3G SSD drives for my MacBook Pro (which controller can only do 3 Gbps link speeds anyways). Regarding the Mini, I'm still enclined to wait a little and see if there are some other issues like, maybe, heat monitoring? ... or extremely contrived manipulations to add a second drive...
Comments from long ago:
Comment from: Ronald
I have a Mac Mini 2010 and it performs like crap, its so slow. I’m not fully up to speed on the HD issue but in your opinion what is the fastest HD I could get for this as an upgrade and would it be worthwhile?
2011-11-06 20-09