Intel Mac hard drive query

Echo toxin · 25 Sep 2006 at 13:50

OK... this is what I was thinking as I rode back to work this afternoon...

I have a Mac mini and three hard drives:

i) internal 5400rpm 80Gb SATA
ii) external 7200rpm 80Gb USB2
iii) external 7200rpm 400Gb Firewire

I'm wondering if it's possible to install Mac OS X on the USB2 drive and have it work quite happily there as my main OS. Will my Intel Mac boot from a USB2 drive? If anything goes wrong will disk repair tools fix USB2 disks?

Then I would reformat the internal SATA drive and put on XP or Vista as neither of those will boot from external drives.

Then use the 400Gb external Firewire for data (partition a bit as FAT32 and the rest as HFS+).

Anyone know if this scenario is likely to work before I muck it all up this evening for nothing. Is it worth it? Will using an OS on a USB2 drive seem horrendously slow?

titchard · 25 Sep 2006 at 14:25

Remember that they have laptop drives, not normal 3.5" HDDs like PC towers.

Rich

Echo toxin · 25 Sep 2006 at 14:31

titchard said:
Remember that they have laptop drives, not normal 3.5" HDDs like PC towers.

Rich

Aye - I won't be swapping drives in/out of the mini - just changing the location of Mac OS X... :cool:

OllyM · 25 Sep 2006 at 15:43

I think you'd be a lot better off doing it from a Firewire drive, but is it really worth all the effort?

Echo toxin · 25 Sep 2006 at 16:15

OllyM said:
I think you'd be a lot better off doing it from a Firewire drive, but is it really worth all the effort?

I guess I'm just slightly disappointed with the hard drive performance in the mini. After a week of using it, it just seems to drag the OS down a bit. Things don't always seem as responsive as they should be.

Don't fancy cracking the case to fit a 7200rpm bigger drive in, as it will void the warranty and I've only had it a week! This is what you get when you're used to two RAID Raptors!

I think I will just leave it alone and put up with it for six months or so, before deciding to go Leopard with a Mac Pro or Vista with my own custom-built PC.