Apple ’s Mac mini has just celebrated its first birthday and received a raw Intel makeover . If you own one , especially the PowerPC interlingual rendition , you may have outgrow its modest backbreaking thrust capacity and connection ports . If so , you may be a sodding nominee for the Wiebetech Maxelerate 160 GB FireWire movement . This external hard drive will , at the very least , double your available disc outer space while tally another USB and FireWire 400 port .
localise up the Maxelerate is easy . It ’s designed to posture beneath the Mac miniskirt , and it comes with all of the cable necessary to connect the USB and FireWire 400 porthole on the mini to the built - in hub on the crusade . Most mini - inspired drives are designed to see identical to the miniskirt with a combination of white plastic and aluminum position , but the Maxelerate uses an all - aluminum case , which is somewhat smaller on top than on the bottom . And though it ’s not a big enough difference to make the miniskirt unstable , it does n’t heap as seamlessly as the other four mini drives we ’ve reviewed ( Please see FireWire Buyer ’s Guide and our limited review of the Iomega MiniMax , 250 G [ ] ) .
In our performance testing , the Maxelerate was a bit sulky when compared to other mini drives , but still quicker than the mini ’s inner parkway . Something to mention : The speed of the Maxelerate , and any drive we try out , will vary count on the campaign mechanism . In this eccentric , Wiebetech had in the beginning sent us a 120 GB model that was no longer available for purchase by the time we were quick to survey it . We did test it , however , and regain that the discontinued thrust was 14 percent faster than this 160 GB fashion model , and nearly 30 percent faster in our single file gemination test .
Macworld’s buying advice
Though the Maxelerate 160 GB FireWire hard drive is not the fastest of the Mac mini - inspire drive - hub combos we ’ve quiz , and it does n’t blend in as seamlessly with the miniskirt , it will greatly inflate your peripheral connection options as well as your usable repositing infinite .
Timed Trials
musical scale = Minutes : Seconds
How We examine : We ran all tests with the FireWire drives connected to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.7 installed and 512 mebibyte of RAM . We tested the drive using FireWire 800 . ( In shell where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we practice FireWire 400 . ) We copy a pamphlet containing 1 GB of information from our Mac ’s hard parkway to the external hard driving to test the driving ’s write amphetamine . We then duplicated that file on the external drive to test both say and write fastness . We also used the drive as a scratch disk when running our humiliated - retention Adobe Photoshop CS Suite test . This test is a set of four tasks execute on a 150 MB file , with Photoshop ’s memory set to 50 percent.—Macworld research laboratory Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
Specifications
[ James Galbraith isMacworld ’s science laboratory director . ]
