Mini Partner Test

Tests : protocol and test bed

Since there would be no real point in running yet another test of a FireWire case, we decided to compare the performance of the Mini Partner with a few internal 2.5" drives.
At first, we thought about timing the boot time of OS X for each of the drives, but since it is so difficult to reproduce the same boot time on the same drive, we decided on the following two tests instead :
1. Quickbench, which benchmarks the throughput of each drive according to the size of the files that are copied. 2. Timing the copy (duplication) of a 411MB folder containing mostly small files. These tests are interesting because they involve reading and writing throughput, but also emphasize on access time, since there are no specific programs to ascertain that specification.
We tested two different 2.5" drives in the Mac mini :
- a 80 GB 4200 RPM drive that can be found in the 1.42GHz mini by default. (Fujitsu)
- the 60 GB 7200 RPM from Hitachi
Since in a few configurations, one can find 5400RPM drives, we benchmarked the Seagate Momentus 100 GB 5400RPM of a Powerbook G4. The Mini Partner is equipped with a 3.5" 400GB 7200RPM Hitachi drive.

Tests : Results

Those results call for a few comments.
- The Momentus has poor read/write performances in random access (i.e. when not using the cache). It even is slower than the standard 80GB 4,200RPM drive. However it still does fairly well in the duplication test. Overall, the cache helps a lot, and the drive sports a fairly good seek time.
- The 80 GB 4,200RPM drive is sluggish, and the Mac is most of the time idling, waiting on the hard drive.
- The 60 GB 7,200RPM Hitachi is still the reigning king in the realm of laptop drives.
- But in any case, none of these drives could match the performance of an external FireWire drive (save the help of the cache in some cases). The FireWire bus is clearly saturated : 33MB/s in write, a tad more in read. The duplication test shows the 3.5" drive's real nature.

To sum up

It is quite difficult to be totally fair towards a product we helped design. Nevertheless, we think that the Mini Partner is a very nice companion to the Mac mini, bringing to the mini the things it lacks : more FireWire and USB ports. We indeed tested the "one touch" backup solution, and it proves very convenient. We also tried to plug an Eye TV 410 to the Mini Partner, and there were no problems whatsoever. The 3.5" drive remained silent (much more silent than the same drive in an AluIce enclosure), and the Mini Partner remained cool to the touch during the tests. You can find the Mini Partner on Macway's website :Macway.