Everything that happens in the world we know,
everything that happens in our daily lives...
Sometimes it's all just a bit unnerving.
Everything that happens in the world we know,
everything that happens in our daily lives...
Sometimes it's all just a bit unnerving.
So, my MiniMate has arrived. It's cute. It's small. It makes me wish I had an actual Mac Mini to pair it with. Nonetheless, it still looks good paired with my powerbook.
I have to say, though, I came very close to returning it in the first few hours of trying to get the stupid thing to work. I unpacked it right after it arrived, wired it all up (both FireWire and USB2) and immediately set to duplicating my PowerBook's internal HD to the MiniMate. No matter what I tried, it would completely lock up after about 60-80MB were transferred. Several times, the drive just completely froze when I'd try to copy any data to it, either with Retrospect, RsyncX or even Finder. It froze up when I tried to reformat it with Disk Utility.
It was bad enough that I eventually gave up hope of the drive working, and attached it via USB to my Linux workstation. There I repartitioned it with a single partition, and tried to create an Ext3 filesystem on it. That froze up, too. Now I was rightly upset, and wondering what the hell could possibly be going on. At this point, I started up badblocks -s -w -v on the drive and went back to work.
I killed the badblocks test, packed everything up, and went home at the end of the day. After dinner, I unpacked everything onto the coffee table, fired it all up, and successfully partitioned the MiniMate HD with a single partition with HFS+. A promising sign, I fired up Retrospect again to duplicate the PowerBook's HD to the MiniMate, and walked away to do something else. Checking back a little while later, I noticed that not only had it not stalled out, it was moving along at a pretty good clip. I still have no idea why it wasn't working earlier.
Maybe that was the magic sauce. Scaring it into thinking I'd beat it into submission on my Linux box made it happy to be a Mac product again? Who knows. At any rate, it started working, and Retrospect told me it peaked at around 450MB/min for transferring data. I tried booting off it afterwards, and the system ran fine and was still snappy. So, this product has now filled exactly the role intended for it, despite the performance anxiety it exhibited when I first unpacked it. I didn't do any hardcore benchmarking, but from my experiences with other FireWire hard drives, this unit's performance was on par with what should be expected. Sustained transfer of large files pushed up past 450MB/min, whereas it really sufferred when copying large amounts of small files. The FireWire and USB2 hubs function as expected.
Overall, it's a really nice package. It comes with a power brick, a four-inch USB cable and a four-inch FireWire cable. The short "jumper" cables reinforce this product's intended use as expansion for a Mac Mini. There is a driver CD included for Windows users. There are some papers and a little booklet of instructions. I never bothered to read the instructions.
Yes, it works perfectly well with Linux (tested with Fedora Core 3) and Windows (well, I didn't test it with Windows, just assuming that since it ships with Windows drivers... oh, go complain elsewhere!)
To end the review of this thing, before we get into dismembering it, I would definitely say that, had I a Mac Mini here at home, I'd definitely get another MiniMate to go with it, and it'd likely be the 400GB version.
So, now that it's working, and I don't have to send it back under warranty, it's time to take it apart and see what makes it tick. First off, opening this thing up, much like opening many hardware devices these days, totally and completely voids your warranty. I presume the location of the serial number sticker on this unit is specifically in hopes that you'll tear it trying to get into your MiniMate, hence proving that you are heathen scum. I discovered with much glee, however, that a very small paperclip solved this problem quite handily. I unfolded the paperclip, snuck it underneath the little gap in the sticker between the metal and plastic parts of the backside, and was able to gently unstick the sticker without damage. Nice, eh?
To take the MiniMate apart, you'll need these tools. Basically, a bendy paperclip (which I used to hook through the vent holes to pull the base out of the lid), a small blade screwdriver, and a standard No. 2 Phillips screwdriver. If you look in this picture closely, you'll see a number of little catch tabs sticking up from the base. These catch in recesses machined into the inner surfaces of the lid, which are visible here. If you're really careful and have a small enough screwdriver, you can do like I did, and gently release the clips one at a time while separating the lid from the base. Specifically, I did like so:
If I get enough requests and enough time, I'll post a full series of photographs on how to do this properly. Don't hold your breath for it to show up in the next week, though.
The end result should look like the picture on the right. Now, staring at this, you'll notice that it really looks like nothing more than a standard 3.5" hard drive and a logic board with FireWire and USB2 ports on it. Well, guess what? You'd be perfectly correct. It turns out there's really not much holding the whole thing together, either, and the only noise insulation provided for the hard drive is the rubber pad on the base. This explains why it's a little noisier than I was expecting. At any rate, if you look here, you'll notice that there are two Philips-head screws between the hard drive and the ports. Remove these screws, and you'll then be able to lift the whole drive and logic board assembly out. Don't forget to disconnect the wires going to the LEDs up front, or you'll get snagged up. Gently press the top edge of the backplate away from the hard drive, grasp the drive around its sides, and lift, pivoting the assembly at the small clips toward the front of the unit. Once the logic board is free of backplate, slide the whole thing back out of the clips up front, and you're free.
Set the drive/board assembly down with the board up (like in the picture at the left). There are three more Philips-head screws holding the two bits together. Remove these, then gently lift the assembly by the drive, and slide the drive away from the IDE connector on the edge of the board. You'll also have to disconnect the power cable.
Whee! You're done! In fact, if you have a bigger IDE drive lying around than what you purchased in the MiniMate, you might as well install it now. The MiniMate is sold with various drive sizes, from 80GB up to 400GB, so I'm guessing any drive you install will simply work. The drive in my unit is an 80GB Western Digital unit. Sadly, I didn't have anything bigger lying around to test out. I haven't worked out the math yet to see if it'd really be any cheaper to buy an 80GB MiniMate and a 400GB bare EIDE drive elsewhere, and frankly, I don't really care. I purchased this unit to act as a backup for my PowerBook's HD in case that should fail (combined with the pair of 250GB FireWire drives I use for rotating nightly backups) because I detest losing my digital life due to failures.
Take a look at all the photos I took of the MiniMate in various stages of disassembly.
