Tag Archives: mac mini

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Today I received my first SSD drives. Meant to finally repair my silly Mac Mini.

One of it’s drives broke a while back and I didn’t get around to fix it yet. Last weekend I found a decent deal at my favorite Computer parts store and acquired 2 Corsair Force GT 60GB.

According to various reviews and sites they’re very good and even durable so I’ll see what happens.

The box tells me the data throughput is specced at 555MB/s for reading and 495MB/s for writing. Which I’m guessing is quite fast. Such numbers never really mattered for conventional disks. 5400Rpm was slow, 7200 was fast. And for high end there was 10000Rpm. The end. So I have no idea what speeds I’m coming from.

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It doesn’t quite work :) , a little bit, but not really.

Often if the specifications of computers match with other Macs you can install an older OS X on it then what came pre-installed on the Mac. Like in this situation I discovered that the Macbook Pro Early 2011 (MacBookPro8,1) has a lot of specifications in common with the Mac Mini Mid 2011 (MacMini5,1)

Same CPU, GPU and ram type. Both have Thunderbolt, bluetooth, wifi, Sata 2 clocked at higher speeds etc.

The Macbook comes with Snow Leopard 10.6.6 and the Mac mini with Lion 10.7. In the old days that would mean that the Mac mini could also run 10.6.6 or newer (10.6.8). Because all drivers are available. Thus if Lion or Mountain Lion doesn’t work for you, you could downgrade to Snow Leopard.

I’ve tried this many times before with G5 macs, earlier Intel models and all kinds of hardware really.

But in this case it seems Apple used a different I/O chip in the Mac mini. Also the I/O for the thunderbolt seems different. Because of these tiny hardware differences it doesn’t work. Very sneaky.

I successfully installed Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini but quickly discovered that the Sata Bus had a throughput of maybe 10/20 kilobytes while using the system. Instead of the advertised 3 Gigabit. This basically means the Sata Bus functions in a sort of fallback mode called PIO. And this is something of the 80′s and with that is super slow. Copying data and writing to the disk will literally take hours.

Another thing that seems to happen is that when you use the Thunderbolt port on the Mac Mini and Snow Leopard loads, the screen goes black. This suggests the firmware or the thunderbolt chip has a slight difference with the Macbook version of it. The Thunderbolt port does, however, keep showing as connected in System information. But it has no output.

However, and this is the weird part. Sata and Thunderbolt worked fine throughout the installation of the setup. This suggests this can be resolved with a driver or modification in Snow Leopard somewhere but I couldn’t find anything constructive for this. I guess no-one has tried this before. Since such things are notoriously hard to find for OS X I didn’t go into that much further and simply upgraded to Mountain Lion.

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With the addition of the Mac Mini Server i bought earlier this week i now have a spare Mac Mini to toy around with.

A 1.5Ghz Core Solo with 2GB Ram.
Given that my Lacie portable broke just before christmas. Or rather, the controller board of Lacie broke (Like so many other Lacie drives) i did some swapping around with disks here and there and suddenly had a 250GB 7200RPM disk spare.
Earlier today i built that thing in into the Mac Mini. But damn was that fucker noisy! I quickly removed it and after some more swapping of disks it now has a 120GB disk at 5400RPM. Which is dead silent. Yay! Originally there was a 60GB disk in there.

Anyway, i wanted to try out the media center idea i’ve been having for weeks now. So i installed Snow Leopard on that machine, installed Plex and got hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of poorly designed settings. After toying with that for a few hours i didn’t even get to play movies properly. The DTS Sound was broken (which is a bug in Plex for the last 6 or so versions) and embedded subtitles do not work. 2 very much required features. That and the total lack of user-friendliness made me decide to look for something else.

Boxee seems very nice, and it is. Apart from its lack of home screen customization, broken DTS downmixing , missing embedded subtitles and poor streaming capabilities i liked the interface a lot! However, since i don’t want to synchronize the mac with my server but just want boxee to look in my movies folder and stream them on demand. It kinda failed. Mounting shares is easy enough, which strangely goes via SMB and not AFP. But then accessing it in a decent matter is a whole different adventure. Every time i would have to go back to the home screen which has the latest online stuff from other users. Something i want to turn off since i’m not at all interested in it. And then find the share under ‘local’. Which lists a ton of other folders and paths you cannot remove. But are not at all familiar too. Another way is to use the browse feature which kinda lets you wander the harddisk and attached devices (including network disks) but that’s confusing too. So if your data is not local, it’s difficult to find. Add broken DTS downmixing and no support for embedded subtitles and you pretty much have a failed software package.

Another thing that didn’t work out well, despite several sites reviewing the Mini saying it was “totally doable”, is that HD content, say anything 1080i and similar, will not always play smoothly. 720p no problems there, streaming it over a 11g Wifi connection. But 1080i often went with a stutter. I’m not sure if it’s because of the wifi, or because of the CPU. But when i copied a file over it wasn’t much better. Just less frequent. So i guess the CPU is on the edge of being capable playing a 1080i movie that is h.264 encoded with AC3 5.1 sound.

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It all started with a joke to my mum that i wanted a mac because it was more like Linux/Unix and thus free of Windows. Rid of the pest so to speak. The aim was a MacBook.

Early 2007 We bought 2 MacBook Pro’s. the 2.16Ghz model. Stood next to my several PC’s
It swiftly replaced my Acer Notebook. I was so impressed with OS X Tiger that i kinda fell in love with it immediately. The ease of use, pretty UI. Well you know how it is if you’ve got a mac.

Mid 2007 i apply for a job at the company where we bought the macs. And got the job. First and second tier phone support on all Apple products and related for customers of that company.

Late 2007 I buy an iPod Touch 8GB and take a PowerMac G4 from work to be my server. My 3Com base station is replaced by an Apple Airport Extreme.

Early 2008 Replaced my MacBook Pro for the then newly released model, the multitouch one. A few months later my main PC was replaced by the new Aluminium iMac 20″. Around this time i dismiss my PowerMac G4 to be replaced by an Ethernet NAS due to problems with OS X Leopard Server. The PowerMac goes to my mum so she can play her games of Myst.

Mid 2008 I aqcuire an iPhone 2G from a colleague at work, i decided i hated jailbreaking that same day but had to get along with it. This device replaces the iPod Touch.

Late 2008 Due to conflicts at my current job i move to another, i will be a Repair Technician. Repairing all applicable Apple products of roughly the last 10 years. My mum replaces her MacBook Pro of almost 2 years for the new Unibody design.

Early 2009 2 Mac mini’s enter the picture. They’re both 2nd hand. One will be my server, a 1.5Ghz core solo replacing the Ethernet NAS.
The other Mini, a 1.42Ghz G4, goes to my mum to replace the PowerMac G4.

Early-Mid 2009 I am now a Certified Mac OS X 10.5 Expert scoring 90 out of 100 in the exam. For fun i have bought an iBook Clamshell G3.
I’m finally approved for an iPhone 3G by T-Mobile and get one the week after.

Mid 2009 Replaced my now one year old MacBook Pro with the newer Unibody 13″ model as my ‘main’ laptop.

Late 2009 Replaced the iMac 20″ with an iMac 27″. The 20″ moved to be my secondary computer and the last PC was thrown out the house.
The wireless network is expanded with another Airport Extreme base station.

So after almost 3 years. No PC remains active in this house. We’ve switched from All PC to All Mac in less than 3 years. All our MP3 players have been replaced by iPods and iPhones and even our home network is powered by Apple.

And we love it!