Apple Mac Mini 1TB Upgrade — Not Easy But Possible

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.

Why am I not surprised?

[PhasmatisApparatus]

The amount of work involved in upgrading a Mac has, usually, been excessive. Probably the worst example of this are the old PowerPC-based Macintoshes like the Performa 6400. The case was made from layer upon layer of plastic and metal panels that each snapped, screwed, or slid into place in ridiculous ways. I always wondered why they even bothered to include PCI slots on these machines, when it was such a pain to get to them.

But you lose the optical drive!

[Nick Ives]

Why would you ever want to do this? Mac hardware is targeted at specific niches, if you don't fit the niche then you're wasting your money buying the hardware. You'd be better off just using a couple of external HDs and hiding them out of view if you want that much storage on your Mac Mini - it'd only be marginally more expensive than this project and you'd still have a DVD drive.

Re:Firewire and USB

[Phroggy]

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.

In fact, you can get something like these [123macmini.com], so your external drive fits precisely underneath the Mac mini. I don't know if any of these support FireWire 800 yet, but obviously new versions will (the new revision of Mac mini has a FireWire 800 [IEEE1394b] port; previous models had FireWire 400 [IEEE1394a]). An external enclosure can use a faster, cheaper, and larger capacity 3.5" drive, so there's pretty much no downside, unless that extra inch and a half of vertical space is really that important to you.

Re:But you lose the optical drive!

[Nick Ives]

Well, I appreciate it in the cool "I've got more money and free time than sense" aspect of pointlessly modifying hardware, I just don't have that much free time.

A computer the size of a Mac Mini with that much storage space is basically a media-centre. If you're prepared to spend time with tools then you might as well build it yourself; if you want OS X build a hackintosh.

And yes, this is my UID. I signed up on the day user accounts were announced. It was quite controversial at the time (Oh noes! Wot about are privacies!!) but was necessary because people were abusing the honour system and pretending to be other people.

Re:Mini Form-Factor Drives

[Eravau]

Hacks that add functionality I get. I guess I just don't see the point of this hack when you're removing capabilities (all optical drive functions) for very little (if any) real gain. I guess if you never need optical drive access again (have fun with those software installs) then this would be fine... but I don't see it being worth anything... unless you get your jollies from doing it "just because you can" as UnknowingFool said above.