MySQL CREATE statement are really slow (Mac OS X / Macport install)
Based on the data for the performance of the two drives you mentioned:

http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hdd_lookup.php?cpu=FUJITSU+MHV2060BHPL

versus

http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hdd_lookup.php?cpu=FUJITSU+MHY2160BH

It looks like the MacBook should be much faster. However, this being a laptop versus a stationary computer, I'm willing to bet you use the MacBook a lot more than the MacMini. Therefore I'm going to suggest that it's likely drive contention in many ways, both in finding open areas on the disk contiguous to create the space as well as other programs on the computer running at the same time. I would really question if you're planning on running the database on this laptop and using the performance metrics from the test runs for anything besides baseline benchmarking. Because when you goto run this code on the server somewhere else it's going to have much better performance.

Until you can eliminate all other factors and declare the two boxes to be as identical as possible can we say why the macmini is faster than the macbook. This becomes an issue for SuperUser not dba.SE