Apple Mac Mini 1TB Upgrade — Not Easy But Possible 95
designperfection9 writes "The new Mac mini is all well and good, but anybody hoping for gobfuls of extra capacity will come away disappointed. Apple's entry-level mini gets 120GB of storage, and it costs $175 to take that up the official 320GB maximum. Happily iFixit decided to step in and take matters into their own hands, with a nine-page pictorial guide to fitting your Mac mini with 1TB of storage." They're also offering a kit to accomplish the same end for $250 — that seems high to me now that 1TB external drives can be had for quite a bit less, and require no putty-knife action to install.
Firewire and USB (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just plug in an external drive. I use an external firewire drive and it performs extremely well. Use a mobile drive and you won't need an extra power source, either. I don't see the need to upgrade the internal drive.
Uh, why? (Score:3, Insightful)
I could kind of understand this back when the Mini only had USB and FW400. Now that they have FW800—why bother? What does anyone use a Mini for that requires 100MB/s+ transfer rates?
Re:Why am I not surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh, why? (Score:3, Insightful)
SATA is 3Gb/s max, FW800 is 0.8Gb/s max.
And the 2.5" 10000RPM VelociRaptor is faster (in most respects) than any 3.5" HD out there.
Re:Mini Form-Factor Drives (Score:2, Insightful)
"I'm not sure what the point is..."
Some people like to open their machines and fiddle with them, adding their own RAM, installing larger harddrives, overclocking the CPU, etc.
They're called"hardware hackers".
Sometimes, it's done simply to save a little money. Sometimes it's done for the fun of messing around with the hardware.
As the folks from MAKE magazine say, "If you can't open it, you don't own it!"
Re:Step 19: Solder each pair of wires [snip] (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh no, soldering!
Invited off my lawn is anyone who considers soldering 2 wires together 'ridiculous'.
Re:Step 19: Solder each pair of wires [snip] (Score:4, Insightful)
It's ridiculous when you consider it's unnecessary. A wire butt connector and a crimp tool is a much faster and easier solution than soldering. You also don't have to worry about a solder joint breaking when you stuff it back into the thing.
Re:Why am I not surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoah, whoah, whoah. Hold it right there. By default, Time Machine backs up every single file on the hard disk. If you were cheap enough to deliberately exclude system directories, you should expect that a full restore is going to be less than painless.
Not only that, but doesn't it pop up a scary warning dialog if you exclude system dirs?
-:sigma.SB