Yesterday I received NewerTech’s MiniStack. It’s basically a enclosure that is form fitted to fit under your Mac Mini. I’m really digging how it looks also. The best part is I’m booting off the 7200rpm drive over the firewire connection which really made a difference in now the unit performs. I’m also considering putting the swap back on the internal 4200 drive to see if that helps since it keeps swap access off the firewire bus and on the ATA100 bus between the swap and memory/proc. The unit costs 99 dolalrs without a hard drive but for 139.99 you get a 80g 7200rpm drive which you cant really get if you went to the store. Add Otherworld Computing’s 5 dollar 2nd day shipping and I had it very quickly.

I had heard that the unit has a lot of fan noise but for the longest time I never heard anything. When I did a lenghty file transfer and the fan spun up full speed yes you can hear it. It’s quieter than all my other PC’s in the house when their fans are going at full tilt.

Another thing about this unit I enjoy is the fact that the blue indicator led flashes when the drive is being accessed. With no indicator on the Mini and the fact that the laptop drive inside is so quiet I could not tell if it was actually doing anything. Now that problem is happily behind me.

Setup was easy, just hook it up and turn it on. It also comes with some programs installed on the internal drive though I have not looked into them. A copy of all Mac commercials was also present so I got to see the 1984 commercial for once.

Now the biggest reason to buy one of these beyond external storage is booting off the firewire drive which does speed the mini up. What I ended up doing since Carbon Copy Cloner was not available for Tiger was just doing a fresh install on the FW drive and migrating from the internal drive. This worked greatly and the only problems was I had to reinstall drivers for my Logitech keyboard and my IntelliMouse Explorer Pro. Once that was all taken care of I patched the system which went faster due to the faster drive. Everything is working fine now and I’m liking things.

There is also a cdrom with some software to tweak the firewire drive. I would leave it alone as it caused problems with the machine refusing to completely shut down until I uninstalled it. There is also a backup utility on the cdrom and I have yet to use it as I already save documents and such on a Raided NFS server on my home network.

Cons? I’m not sure other than the Tiger compatibility of the software, which could of been fixed by a patch if I had taken the time to check. I definately would reccomend this for other Mini users who wish to cheaply ditch the 4200 rpm drive in the Mini.

And if you’re a potential Mini user eyeing one of these to go with the Mini. You might want to wait a week before deciding. Rumours abound about a update to the Laptop and Mini lines as early as next week.