REVIEW: LaCie Mini 250GB
If I had written this article just a week ago it would have been very, very different. Let's just say I've had one or two "issues", however after having a good, hard think about it and a scoot around Google and the Apple Forums I am more inclined to think it is OSX that is at fault than my LaCie Mini firewire drive.
The drive in question
First a bit of background. Much as though the Mac Mini has been an important breakthrough product for Apple, allowing many who previously would have balked at the idea of spending Apple-prices on a new computer of which they weren't entirely sure that they would like the OS, the Mini with its much lower price allowed many to take the risk. I was one of those people, my 1.42GHz 512MB Mini was my first ever Mac. I have since bought an iBook so they must have been doing something right.
However the Mac Mini is far from perfect. I wrote the other day about the joys of getting a decent audio input. There is a lack of upgradability, for example memory can only go to 1GB and it is a bizarre and risky maneuver to get into the machine to change it. The machine also only has one memory slot so if you are going to upgrade the memory you WILL be left with a stick of unusable RAM afterwards.
But by far, for me, the worst thing has been disk speed. The Mini is basically a laptop in a smaller box with no screen or keyboard. The thing is, it is not a particularly high-speced laptop. The hard drive definitely shows this, clocking in at 4200rpm. These are just about the slowest drives you can buy - most desktops these days have 7200rpm drives. This affects so much from application loading speeds to process switching when stuff has been cached to disk - and lets not forget Spotlight, Apple's new search technology. On the Mini's awful HD often it feels like you may as not bother.
One thing you can do about this - and along with raising the memory to 1GB one of the few things you can do to raise performance for your Mini - is to get an external drive and run off that. These come in two flavours, USB2 and Firewire. Firewire has the advantage that you can use an external firewire drive as your boot device, meaning you can actually install OSX to it. A USB2 drive can just be used for file storage meaning that OSX still has to be installed to the Mini's HD.
So I went with the LaCie Mini 250GB. Its basically a 7200rpm/8MB Cache drive in a firewire case that is styled to match the Mac Mini. It sits underneath and, well, that's about it. All good so far. Well, I haven't installed anything yet.
The LaCie Mini in all its glory.
It is around here that this article would have been radically different a week ago. To put things simply, things went very, very wrong. Installing OSX to the drive was simple. It is formatted for Mac users and you just choose the drive as the target after booting from the OSX DVD. Once it is installed you can keep the OSX installation on the Mini's internal HD and use OSX's "Startup Disk" option to choose which to boot to.
Startup Disk
The eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed that I have 10.4.4 installed on the Mini's internal HD but only 10.4.3 on the LaCie Mini. "Why?" you may ask. Well, reader, that's the problem. 10.4.4 seems to have utterly screwed booting from external drives.
I installed OSX clean to the drive, meaning that I took an empty disk and used the installation DVD that I got when I bought Tiger (aka OSX 10.4.0). That installed fine. I then did the upgrades that Software Update offered me, including the 10.4.4 upgrade. All went fine, until I rebooted.
Kernel Panic (Not Mine, I Downloaded This)
The above is what a Mac looks like when it crashes. Its called a Kernel Panic and it happened a lot. An awful lot. I was cursing this LaCie disk like nothing on Earth. That's why this article would be a lot different if I had written it a week ago, because I now really don't think there's anything wrong with the LaCie Mini at all. In fact, I think it is a pretty damn good piece of kit. The problem is with OSX. It's broken.
You see I gradually began to realise that there was one, and only one, time where crashing/kernel panicing occurred - when I did the OSX 10.4.4 update. I tried all sorts of variants of how to get to the be running 10.4.4, from doing a straight upgrade from 10.4.0, to downloading the intermediate stages from Apple.com and doing them in order, but every single time the machine crashed on booting after the final step, the 10.4.4 upgrade. Something smelt fishy. I was doing this from a fresh install.
So I installed one last time and instead stopped at 10.4.3, which for the past week now has been working perfectly. Hell, I'm using it right now to type this. Not a single crash. I am pretty nervous about upgrading in the future though. Unless Apple states clearly that they have a "new" version of 10.4.4 that won't crash on external firewire drives I will be giving 10.4.4 a miss. The problem then is, do I upgrade to 10.4.5 when it inevitably comes out? Let's just say that I'll have to wait and see. I want to see something in the release notes that mentions crashing when booting from external firewire drives and even then I think I'll wait until others have taken the risk.
So anyway, I started investigating this to see if others are having the same problem. Let's just say they are. A quick search of Apple.com's forums (search for "10.4.4 firewire") shows several people with anything from crashing to drive corruption and the accompanied data loss. However there seems to have been no word from Apple about it. Needless to say I'll be forwarding them the URL of this article to see if they have any comment. When checking the panic.log for one of the kernel panics I had it seemed to blame "com.apple.filesystems.msdosfs(1.4.3)", however searching for that and "firewire" using the trusty Google only came up with a site in German which isn't of much use to me, a person who doesn't speak German.
This does beg the question as to why MSDOS would be a problem, seeing as I don't have any MSDOS formatted partitions on any of the many computers I own. However according to AppleInsider Apple has asked testers of the 10.4.5 update to test "networking, the Mac OS X crash report, File Sync, Software Update and the MSDOS File System", so maybe there is something in this after all.
So anyway, the long and short of it is that the LaCie Mini is a great piece of kit. My Mini is now much more responsive, if a tiny bit louder and I see much less of the dreaded beach ball. I definitely recommend anyone who thinks their Mac Mini is a bit too slow to get one.
One last thing, in its shipped form the drive has a funky icon, but after reinstalling OSX I seemed to lose it and ended up with this piece of crap:
Piece of Crap
Well it turns out that you can download an Icon Pack from LaCie's Website to get it back again and have it looking like new:
Not a Piece of Crap
M Panda
Update 2006-04-21:
Please have a look at this article to see how I solved this issue and managed to upgrade to 10.4.6.
