Mac Mini; boosted!

[neil.b]

Completed the DIY upgrade of my Mac Mini last night. Now has 1gig RAM and a much faster (7200rpm) hard disk (the original 4200rpm drive being well documented on bench-testing sites as being a speed bottle-neck for Minis).

Very gingerly disassembled and reassembled using the thorough instructions from this chap;

www.smashsworld.com/2005/01/mac-mini-complete-technical.php

It now feels much more nimble and responsive. Your own mileage may vary, it depends on what applications you use etc. I posted mainly to include the link to that PDF - its a very handy little document.

Now for my next project - using the old drive from the Mac Mini to resurrect the dead Powerbook

[rednotdead]

Which new hard drive did you go for? She who must be obeyed is starting to whinge about lack of disks space on her mini-me.

[neil.b]

rednotdead said:

Which new hard drive did you go for? She who must be obeyed is starting to whinge about lack of disks space on her mini-me.

Might not solve your problem then. As far as I know (waits for someone to say otherwise), the 2.5 inch drives are limited to 80gig, which is what is already in your Mac Mini (well it was in mine, I can't remember what the options were at the time of buying). I changed mine because the newer one has a fast spin speed, bigger cache and lower average seek/fetch times than the old the old one.

If storage is going to be a constant issue for you, I'd recommend getting one of these Lacie drives (I have a 250gb one that has all of my music on it);

www.ghc.co.uk/acatalog/Mac_mini_Companion_Hard_Disk_Drives.html

Sits nicely under the Mac. Stick all your files on that and leave the internal drive just for System and Programs.

[rednotdead]

She has one of the early ones - 40Gb, even 80 or 100Gb would be an improvement.

[neil.b]

rednotdead said:

She has one of the early ones - 40Gb, even 80 or 100Gb would be an improvement.

I think I'd still go the external drive route. But if you fancy getting your hands dirty;

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpresentation/index

This is the one I got. Just noticed you can get 100gb but for me it wasn't worth the extra as i store all my data on the external drive.

You'll still have to do the cloning or reinstall everything from scratch though, if you're going to replace the internal drive. If you just bought more external storage you wouldn't have to. The cloning requires a third drive or an external firewire caddy that can take the old 2.5. You can then boot from the external drive and clone the system/programs to the new internal one.