Upgrading Hard Drive in Mac Mini

[.Joel]

Hey all,

Just curious, I purchased a Mac Mini yesterday, and slotted in 1gb of DDR ram and the thing screams along. I am so impressed by its speed with photoshop and dreamweaver it is amazing what these little boxes can pump out. However, after researching a little bit further the next move is to upgrade the hard-drive. I purchased it with the 40gb, as I am going to put in a larger faster hard drive. My question is 5400rpm or 7200rpm ? I know you can safely put in a 5400rpm hard drive, but I am curious to know if a 7200rpm hard drive would generate too much heat. Has anyone else here tried or experianced this ? Just wanting to know if it is safe to install a 7200rpm or will it cook the components in the mac mini ?

 

[mad jew]

Firstly, if you reckon you can upgrade your own hard drive in one of those things, then kudos to you because from what I've heard, it's not all that easy.

Now, second thing, I can't quite answer your question but I can say that 7200rpm drives are fine in iBooks which I imagine have a harder time keeping everything cool and therefore the mini should probably be fine.

 

[fuzzwud]

There should be no problem. See what this company is selling:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/mac-mini/

 

[caveman_uk]

Firstly, if you reckon you can upgrade your own hard drive in one of those things, then kudos to you because from what I've heard, it's not all that easy.

Now, second thing, I can't quite answer your question but I can say that 7200rpm drives are fine in iBooks which I imagine have a harder time keeping everything cool and therefore the mini should probably be fine.

The take-aparts for the mac mini look a piece of cake compared to the ibook one I've got to follow next weekend!

The only trick with the mac mini is that if you decide to put your own superdrive in one you need one set to slave as there's only one IDE channel in the mini and both devices share it. In all other macs there's two channels. Often laptop-style optical drives don't have jumpers and the master/slave setting is set at the factory so make sure you get the right one. This doesn't affect 2.5" hard drives as you'll only ever be usung those as a master.

Of course you could get a 7200rpm firewire drive and that would be comparable in speed to an internal drive. It wouldn't look as good though!

 

[.Joel]

The take-aparts for the mac mini look a piece of cake compared to the ibook one I've got to follow next weekend!

The only trick with the mac mini is that if you decide to put your own superdrive in one you need one set to slave as there's only one IDE channel in the mini and both devices share it. In all other macs there's two channels. Often laptop-style optical drives don't have jumpers and the master/slave setting is set at the factory so make sure you get the right one. This doesn't affect 2.5" hard drives as you'll only ever be usung those as a master.

Of course you could get a 7200rpm firewire drive and that would be comparable in speed to an internal drive. It wouldn't look as good though!

I have an external 200gb Seagate firewire drive. However I bought the Mac Mini for its portability. So if I need to take it with me to a seminar and connect it to a projector I can etc. But then it also doubles as a home PC. I sold my Powerbook 12" 1.5 to replace it with a mac mini and I am very very satisfied.

 

[caveman_uk]

OK then. If you want to do the hard drive upgrade yourself then you can find Apple's service manual here (22MB download) - maybe get hold of some klapton tape as there seems to be a lot of it in a mini. All the tools you should need are a couple of screwdrivers, a putty knife and your trusty (every mac take-apart needs one) black plastic stick!

If you don't fancy doing it yourself then OWC have an upgrade service for $99 that will do the upgrade and ship the appropriate box backand forth. They also give trade ins on the original drive Link . I guess other US companies may also offer similar schemes.