
- Ssd drive for mac mini 2010 pro#
- Ssd drive for mac mini 2010 mac#
- Ssd drive for mac mini 2010 windows#
Ssd drive for mac mini 2010 mac#
The $699 mini is the only Mac that currently ships with less than 4GB of memory (except for the MacBook Air). Video encoding performance is once again where we’d expect it to be, roughly on par with the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Here I'm taking an XviD and converting it to an iPhone-supported H.264 format. Our final benchmark is more consumer focused. Compared to a mobile Core i5 you’re looking at roughly 70% of the performance. If we’re totally CPU bound, which is the case with Cinebench, you’ll see that the mini performs no differently than the 13-inch MacBook Pro. I’m a fan of the Cinebench test because it lets me show off both single and multithreaded performance in the same workload. Our Aperture test is heavier on the I/O and thus narrows the gap between the 13-inch MBP and the mini. Not only does the mini ship with 2GB of memory but it has to share 256MB with the GeForce 320M.įor my Aperture test I simply timed how long it took to import 203 12MP RAW images into the library. Photoshop performance is decent, but again behind the latest MBPs because we’re swapping to disk. We're running the exact same benchmark here, basically performing a bunch of image manipulations and filters and timing the entire process.

Ssd drive for mac mini 2010 windows#
The Retouch Artists Speed Test we use for our CPU testing under Windows also works under OS X. You’ll see this trend continuing as we go through our tests.
Ssd drive for mac mini 2010 pro#
The entire process stresses both the disk and CPU, which is why we see a huge improvement when going to an SSD as well as differences between CPU speeds.Īpplication launch performance is slower than the 13-inch MacBook Pro because of the mini’s 2GB of memory. I launched, in order: Mail, Safari, Activity Monitor, iTunes, iCal, DVD Player, iPhoto, Photo Booth, Quicktime Player, Disk Utility, Preview, iMovie, Front Row, Garage Band and Aperture. I decided to take it to the next level and write a quick script to launch 15 applications in a row, timing how long the entire process takes. General OS usage is a difficult thing to quantify, but one measure of performance has always been the number of bounces an icon in the dock makes before an application loads. I did throw in some results from the early 2008 iMac I reviewed a while back. I didn't have any previous generation Intel Mac minis on hand so the performance comparison is mainly to the MacBook/MacBook Pro. While that may change in another quarter or two, we still need Apple to take SSDs more seriously than it has been. These days the name of the game is SandForce. I’m going to take this opportunity to again plead for Apple to include a decent SSD in its customization options.

The Mac mini is absolutely begging to have an SSD, and unlike the rest of Apple’s Mac lineup, one isn’t even offered on the mini. To Apple’s credit, OS X does a good job of caching frequently used data but without enough RAM this is a wobbly crutch.

The drive keeps power consumption and noise down to a minimum, while being awful for performance. The second is the hard drive.Īpple ships the Mac mini with a 2.5” 5400RPM notebook drive. Even light multitasking exposes this weakness. The first is memory, and I’ll touch on this in more detail later, but 2GB of RAM is simply not sufficient for a computer running a heavyweight OS. There are two problems with the overall performance of the mini that will contribute to it feeling slow, particularly over time. Given that Apple’s iPad is fast enough for many users today, I don’t think it’s too difficult to understand that the 2010 Mac mini is sufficient for most needs. The original Mac mini was fast enough for the entry level Mac user back in 2005.
