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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.
The summary says the actual content is on iFixit, but the link goes to some useless blog which then links to iFixit.
Link directly to the content, include a via link if you want to reference where you got the link from.
For the record, the proper article URL where the actual content is follows:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Mac-mini-A1283-Terabyte-Drive/660/1
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
The Mac Mini takes notebook hard drives. They only go up to 500GB right now. Getting 1TB requires removing the optical drive, which now with this generation is SATA so it's actually compatible with decent-sized hard drives.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
What about the G3/G4 towers? Those are some of the easiest to work on machines out there. Pull the lever, lower the side of the case, tada! Easy to change drives, PCI cards, CPU, and memory. These were probably the best built Macs ever.
And here's the content in PDF format in case you want to keep it for later reference: http://www.ifixit.com/pdf/guide_660_en.pdf
The amount of work involved in upgrading a Mac has, usually, been excessive.
This has only been true historically with the consumer models. The models that Apple designates for "professional" usually upgrade much easier. My current G5 has full access from a side door (as well as the current Mac Pro line) and even my old LC and 4400 had easily accessible PDS and PCI slots when the case is slid off. (My iMac G4 was the only machine I had I couldn't upgrade myself.) It's just that, as the "ease of use" brand in the industry, Apple's more famous machines are the all-in-one and laptop units that have the more cramped assembly and design.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
I'm not sure what the point is when you can keep the same desktop footprint with one of the many stackable external drives that have been manufactured with a Mini form factor. There's a list of links on a post here.
MiniStack 3 came out a couple of years back: http://www.newertech.com/products/ministackv3.php
eSATA, FW800 and FW400, USB 2.0.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The trouble is that Apple doesn't sell an upgradable machine unless you get a Mac Pro, which is CAN$2900 and up. If you want a modest Macintosh computer you have no easily upgradable options.