The 2012 Mac Mini performance

I picked up a the newest version of the Mac Mini with the Ivy Bridge chipset (2.6 gHz quad-core i7, HD4000 gpu/768 mb shared vRAM, 16 gb RAM). I installed a 240 gb SSD in the second drive bay, then made a "fusion" drive with the 1 TB hard disk using diskutil in the terminal. I installed Aperture 3 and copied my current Aperture library (96 gb) to see how the computer performed. Editing of 5D mark II raw files was in real-time, even with the brushes, which are the most computationally-intensive part of Aperture. Same for Nik Color Efex Pro. The Geekbench score was 11917, which is 3753 points higher than my two year old i7 hackintosh. Looking at the Geekbench benchmarks for Macs, this puts this Mini above the 8-core Xenon Mac Pro from 2009. I think Intel has done a fabulous job with Ivy Bridge and its gpu performance is quite remarkable for editing raw image files.

Congrats on the new Mini!!!

How impressed with the HD4000 graphics are you? Such an improvement on HD3000

BlankThis wrote in post #15193191
How impressed with the HD4000 graphics are you? Such an improvement on HD3000

I am stunned that the Mini with its 2.6 gHz quad-core i7 and HD4000 outperforms my 2.9 gHz quad-core i7 (LGA 1156) and 5870/2 gb graphics card. I mean, it's not even close in terms of speed. I don't know how much of that is due to the Fusion drive in the Mini (my old i7 has a 128 gb 3 Gb/s SSD and a 2 TB 7200 rpm 3.5" hard drive), but either way, the Mini is much better to use.

I am interested in the new mini. How hard was it to install the additional drive? Also, is there a website that describes the necessary terminal work to get the two drives to act as a fusion drive? Have you noticed a significant difference in the speed of your traditional drive due to 'fusing' it with the SSD?

Sorry for all the questions....extremely interested.

zosobao5150 wrote in post #15195524
I am interested in the new mini. How hard was it to install the additional drive?

It is not hard, but it is challenging. You have to completely disassemble the Mini. It probably voids your warranty, too. If you take your time and plan ahead, keep all the screws separate (an ice tray works great for this), it's doable for anyone who has a bit of experience opening up computers. I used the Data Doubler kit from Other World Computing and it includes all the hardware AND tools necessary to do the job. Here's the kit:

http://eshop.macsales.​com/item/OWC/DIYIMM11D​2/

Here's how you do it:

http://eshop.macsales.​com …deos/mac_mini20​11_ssddiy/

NOTE: Use at your own risk! Make sure to have one (better yet, two) backup of your data. At best, this should be considered experimental until a lot of people have been using it for weeks or months. You MUST install the OS from Apple's OS X 10.8.4 installer (or higher) for the fusion drivers to be installed with Disk Utility. This is most easily done by downloading the latest Mountain Lion installer from the Apple App Store and using a USB thumb drive for the installation. This will work with all Macs that can use Mountain Lion and have at least two drive bays (all Macs other than the MacBook Air).

After you install the SSD and get the computer running again, you need a third (external) drive to boot from. So you need to do a manual install of the OS onto this drive, or clone your boot drive to the external drive. I have a 2.5" FW800 drive that I used for this; although it may be possible with an 8 or 16 gb USB flash drive. Disconnect all other drives so that only the internal SSD, internal HD and external bootable drive are connected. Restart the computer and as soon as you hear the chime, press and hold the Option key until all bootable volumes show up. Select the external boot drive and proceed with the boot.

After it boots, open a terminal window and enter these lines:

diskutil list

This lists all the disks and will have numbers like disk0 and disk1. On my system, disk0 was the SSD, disk1 was the internal 1 TB hard drive and disk2 was my external Firewire drive. Next, type

diskutil cs create OSX disk0 disk1

The SSD must be first (disk0 in this case) and the internal HD must be second (disk1 in this case). This creates a new, unformatted logical volume to be used as the fusion drive. Anything you had on those two drives is now gone. Next, type

diskutil cs list

This will show you the volume ID of the new logical volume (for this example, 893B421-HF312-5CD2-B2B3-3C4D38810H). Next, type

diskutil cs createVolume 893B421-HF312-5CD2-B2B3-3C4D38810H jhfs+ OSX 100%

This formats the logical volume and names it "OSX". The 1200g is the number I used for mine and it makes it 1.2 TB in size. The new volume should show up. If you used Carbon Copy Cloner to make your external boot drive, just use it again to reclone the external drive to the new fusion drive. It appears to take some usage for the OS to figure out what files to move to the SSD, so the more you use it, the faster it gets (in the first few hours or days).

The computer feels like it has a 1.2 TB 6 Gbps SSD in it. It is very snappy.

Do these Fusionized drives appear as a single disk and OSX handles the transition of files between the SSD and HDD automatically?

Tony-S wrote in post #15193098
The Geekbench score was 11917, which is 3753 points higher than my two year old i7 hackintosh. Looking at the Geekbench benchmarks for Macs, this puts this Mini above the 8-core Xenon Mac Pro from 2009. I think Intel has done a fabulous job with Ivy Bridge and its gpu performance is quite remarkable for editing raw image files.

The Geekbench scores here http://browser.primate​labs.com/geekbench2/to​p?page=599 seem to show i7 based machines scoring around 15,000.

Are you sure your Hackintosh is running properly?

Even in just 32bit mode my 2600k scored 9900.


It sounds like Apple have done a fantastic job of creating an SSD/Spinning disc hybrid with fusion drive.

These have been around for sometime, often as PCI cards, but require aftermarket drives to do the advanced caching etc in Windows.
There are some excellent reviews in Toms Hardware that demonstrate just how big an impact it can have on performance, especially every day computing tasks.

Tony - Thanks SO much for that explanation...it was extremely helpful. I am still trying to decide between the 2.3 or 2.6 i7.

Same question I faced ordering rMPBs for the wife and I. I asked myself how long will we keep them machines. For us that will be at least the 3 years of Apple Care. So in 3 years if the workload likely to go or go down from OS updates and the applications we purchase/upgrade. For us the answer is the load will go up...we just do not know how much. Do we want good resale value with we sell the machines later? Yes. So I got the max CPU and memory for us today and tomorrow....and for resell value much later in the future.

Moppie wrote in post #15195966
Are you sure your Hackintosh is running properly?

Probably not. It seems like it should have been much higher than that. OS X runs in 64-bit but the freeware Geekbench only runs in 32-bit. I don't know what kind of impact that might make. I'll do a fresh reboot and run it straight away to see if that makes a difference. I'm sure there are other background tasks that accumulate after weeks or months between restarts.

zosobao5150 wrote in post #15198021
Tony - Thanks SO much for that explanation...it was extremely helpful. I am still trying to decide between the 2.3 or 2.6 i7.

I went with the 2.6 since it's one thing that cannot be upgraded at a future date. The Mini is a remarkable engineering feat, if you ask me. It was rather stressful going through the disassembly, but after each step I thought to myself "oh, that was easy". The only things that really gave me pause was removing the connectors from the logic board. They tiny and look quite fragile. Be extra careful with those.

I have a 2009 dual-core i7 MacBook Pro with a 128 gb SSD and a 750 gb spinning drive. This weekend I'm going to convert it to a fusion drive.

I just got back from the store with the base model. I will try not to threadjack but I may post here how it runs aperture and such just as a comparison to the review you have up. So far I am loving this thing.