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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 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.
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.
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
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?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Anything worth doing, is worth doing with a little putty-knife action.
Slashdot is kind of like Playboy; we aren't here to read the articles.
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
Why would you ever want to do this?
You must be new here. Did you buy that three-digit id or what? ;-)
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.
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.
Nick
Oh no, soldering!
Invited off my lawn is anyone who considers soldering 2 wires together 'ridiculous'.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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.