Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

How much did you pay for it, Puiyin?

Would like to hear more about a home made fusion... tempted to try it myself...

In short, I used the Other World Computing mac mini kit from the US. Was going to try and get the parts from the UK, but things like the HDD ribbon cable are hard to get and cost as much as the postage from America. Plus, OWC give you a guide and all necessary tools.

For making the two drives into a fusion, I found a guide with all the steps. Something like this. It's not too difficult as long as you're comfortable with Terminal and follow everything carefully.

Worth it.

How much did you pay for it, Puiyin?

£300, it turns out it's not the current model, it's the Mid 2011 model, he claims it to be a 2012 model, that probably just means he bought it in 2012...

I could probably get a cheaper one off ebay or elsewhere, but I wanted a cheap and cheerful mac and this fits the bill.

Think I will get this SSD for the Mac Mini... thoughts?

Yes. Doit.

In other news, I got burgled. Half my camera kit, both my laptops and girlfriends, and iPad. So my hand has been forced, went out and bought a 11" Air to keep my going whilst the insurance kicks in. It's fast. Oh and three year guarantee at John Lewis right now.

Shit, sorry to hear that. Very happy with my air - apart from it dropping the WiFi connection every time the display goes to sleep

So does my mbp, think its an osx thing. Read somewhere that you can fix it by deleting a .plist somewhere but haven't got round to fix it yet

I'll look out for that. Mainly going to be in clamshell mode hooked up to my monitor at home though.

You think they would have included a bug fix for that in one of the 2 million updates...

Think I will get this SSD for the Mac Mini... thoughts?

i have this drive in my macBook..runs fantastic!!

Oh and three year guarantee at John Lewis right now.

Three years? last I remember it was 2, what's the deal with that?

so my new old Mac Mini is very slow with the Internet, tried different browsers etc, did the usual network checks etc, nothing seems to be wrong. And no, there is nothitng wrong with my Internet as it's perfectly fine with my laptops etc. Any pointers??

i have this drive in my macBook..runs fantastic!!

Think I will go with the pro version, it's only another fiver and it should, in theory, last longer... according to what I have read so far...

How much memory (HD) do you have left?

create a maclinux usb boot stick. reboot into it, see if still slow.

if still slow, hardware is ooooooooldddddd
if not slow, then it's osx causing you a pain

Odds are it's OSX (especially if you upgraded to mavericks). Chuck ram and more ram at it.

so my new old Mac Mini is very slow with the Internet, tried different browsers etc, did the usual network checks etc, nothing seems to be wrong. And no, there is nothitng wrong with my Internet as it's perfectly fine with my laptops etc. Any pointers??

Mine was crap until I put 8gb in it. Launching apps was painful. I was on 2gb but same prob is guess...

How much memory (HD) do you have left?

More than enough to run good old internet... Start up time is still only about 15 seconds...

It only has 4 GB, but still it should be enough...

With try your suggestion, Kirth. By the way, whey you say the hardware might be old, do you mean outdated or old as in wear and tear? Since I don't know the history of this mac and have never bought a 2nd hand before, this might be a stupid question to ask, but... As for model, it's only a mid 2011, so newer that one of my MacBooks...

Mine was crap until I put 8gb in it. Launching apps was painful. I was on 2gb but same prob is guess...

8GB for Internet is just wrong. Why? Why would someone like my dear mother, for example, would want 8GB ram? I bet my PowerBook G4 that has I think 1GB ram is faster than this sodding Mac mini...

I'm not talking about RAM I'm talking about hard drive space, with less than 10GB left, the computer gotten slower until I free it up.

8GB is the new 512MB, think of 4GB as 256MB.

And I am talking about I have enough of both...

I am seeing instability and slow, rather than plain slow... Hummm...

do the browsers crash ?
possible the ram is having to do more and more crc/parity checking to keep stuff running.

memtest86 is good to check that out

And Ed's right, OSX (and iPhone for that matter) is notorious for crawling to a halt the closer you get to having a full harddrive.

No they don't. For example, I needed to download Firefox earlier as I only got the machine a couple of days back. First attempt, it was showing 2hrs 40mins. I cancelled it, shut the browser all together, then tried again, this time it was about 7 mins. Even this is slow. It only took about 30seconds on my new mac, though I am not comparing them.. As for storage, I totally understand the logic behind it, but there are 48GB left out or a wee 60GB SDD. Unless 60GB in total is the culprit...

I don't know if i wanna spend money on upping the ram and the SSD, the only reason I bought this is to show stuff on for my degree show coming up and for watching TV, downloading stuff etc, so want to I keep it to the bare minimum possible...

386.3MB system updates download will take 6 hours... Yeah right...

Anyway bed time, will try your suggestions tomorrow, Kirth and will report back. Thanks buddy.

I'm not talking about RAM I'm talking about hard drive space, with less than 10GB left, the computer gotten slower until I free it up.

8GB is the new 512MB, think of 4GB as 256MB.

Disk space is not memory.
It is disk space.
Memory is memory.

Hope that helps.