Though Apple ’s Mac mini is n’t quite as popular as the iPod , it has attracted its part of third - party accessory seller . In fact , there are at least five major storage company now making background hard drives designed to sit beneath this ultra - stocky Mac . The in style company to embark such a gadget is Iomega , whose quick MiniMax drive not only increase the amount of useable datum memory board , but also sport an integrate hub which double the amount of uncommitted USB and FireWire 400 ports uncommitted to you .
As any Mac miniskirt owner can severalise you , with its one FireWire 400 port and two USB ports , it does n’t take long to run out of peripheral options . And with the mellow - closing Mac mini model offering only 80 GB of unvoiced disc space , it is promiscuous to see how the 250 GB MiniMax could be the answer to many a mini owner ’s orison .
position up the MiniMax is a breeze . Simply heap your Mac mini on top of the MiniMax and connect the two using the included FireWire and USB gadget cable television . fireplug in the power cable length , flick the power switch on the MiniMax , and the drive will automatically climb on your Mac miniskirt ’s screen background . The MiniMax is bootable via FireWire in OS X , so you may utilise it as a your inauguration disk if you ’d like . And you may want to , because in terms of speed , the MiniMax is the fast mini drive we ’ve tested in for a while , pull ahead two out of three crusade psychometric test and trail by just one s in the third test . For more review of these movement , see buyer ’ pathfinder : FireWire Hard Drives .
Timed Trials
graduated table = Minutes : Seconds
How We test : We ran all tests with the FireWire drives connected to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.9 set up and 512 megabyte of read/write memory . We tested the campaign using FireWire 800 . ( In case where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we apply FireWire 400 . ) We copied a folder control 1 GB of information from our Mac ’s hard thrust to the outside hard drive to test the drive ’s write fastness . We then reduplicate that file on the international drive to screen both read and write fastness . We also used the drive as a cabbage disk when run our low-toned - computer memory Adobe Photoshop CS Suite test . This test is a set of four tasks do on a 150 MB file , with Photoshop ’s retention set to 50 percent.—Macworld research laboratory Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
Specifications
Macworld’s buying advice
If you own a Mac mini , you should check out the Iomega MiniMax . It fit neatly under the mini and its speedy 250 GB hard effort and integrated USB and FireWire hub make it a expectant familiar to Apple ’s littlest Mac .
[ James Galbraith isMacworld ’s science lab director . ]
