QUOTE(aleni @ May 16 2005, 05:45)
my mini has 5400rpm, and i recently have just bought an external firewire hd case and put a 7200 maxtor on it. now the mini boots up off the firewire hd, but i think there is no performance difference in using it. is it because of the limited bandiwth of the firewire?
[right][snapback]585926551[/snapback][/right]
Not really. Go back and read what I wrote before about the physical size of the drive making a difference. A 5400 RPM 2.5" drive is going to have higher performance than a 5400 RPM 3.5" drive of a similar size since the information stored on it is more dense. Not
quite as high as a 7200 RPM 3.5" drive, but so close that you probably wouldn't tell the difference in most cases. The spindle speed isn't the only factor in drive speed, either. The buffer size and seek times are important too. It may be that your internal drive has an 8MB buffer and your external one only has 2MB.