I have recently swapped my desktop PC tower to a Mac Mini because of a couple of reasons, one, I hardly game anymore hence I don’t need the power and two, my desktop PC uses a fair bit of power thanks to it’s 1000W power supply unit.
So I thought I had a bright idea by swapping the desktop with a Mac Mini instead. The Mac Mini only uses around 85W of power at peak consumption and since it runs as my PLEX Media server, a scanner server, a print server and also media storage, I guess using less power means a lower electricity bill.
The moment I got the Mac Mini in, I noticed that it wasn’t as fast as my i7 quad-core desktop running with 16Gb of RAM and a SSD. The Mac Mini only has 4Gb of RAM, an i5 processor and running on a 5400 rpm hard disk. Talk about swapping from a Veyron to a Volvo station wagon.
Running OS X Mavericks on the Mac Mini was a little slow and sluggish and the moment the PLEX server runs with other programs in the background, it comes to a halt sometimes.
I tried multiple programs to clean the OS and that didn’t work.
I figured out that the only way to improve speed was a hardware upgrade and I started out with the most basics of basics, a RAM upgrade.
Out went the double sticks of 2Gb RAM and in goes the double sticks of 8Gb RAM.
With 16Gb of RAM under the hood, the Mac Mini is blazingly fast. The performance improvement is really considerable and can be easily felt.
So if you are facing speed and performance issues with your Mac Mini, just go with the RAM upgrade. Initially I was considering swapping out the current hard disk with an SSD hard disk, but based on its current performance, I doubt that I might want to go ahead with that upgrade.
Image source: Techradar
