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Mac Mini HDD Swappable?

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wake6830

Gawd
Joined
Jan 3, 2005
Messages
843
I'm interested in purchasing one of the new mac minis, but I'm looking for a bigger hard drive. Will it be possible to pop the case open and put my own in there?
 
maybe. wait till they start shipping, I'm sure the hack/mod guides will show up in short order.

they sell an 80gb model and you could always add a USB or Firwire HD.
 
from what i can tell it's a normal 2.5" notebook drive in there. should be doable.

though i would caution against voiding the warranty on anything Rev-A you buy from apple. get a firewire drive in the interim.
 
If I buy a usb drive then, can I use it to back up both my pc and the mac if i separate it into two partitions?
 
wake6830 said:
If I buy a usb drive then, can I use it to back up both my pc and the mac if i separate it into two partitions?
Click to expand...

OS X can read/write FAT32, so you might try that route.
 
It'd be kind of stupid (and expensive) to design new standards for a low-cost machine like that, so I reckon it's user swappable.

However.

Looking at the picture on the Apple website, in the design section of the mac minis marketing stuff, it looks like the unit is held together with lots of plastic teeth, rather than screws, so opening it without doing damage might be tricky, but it must be do-able.

On the applestores various bits it only specifically says that the the airport/bluetooth component is not user swappable, which would be a strange thing to say if none of the other traditionally swappable components were replaceable as well.

I've gone ahead and ordered the base model with AE, I'm planning on swapping out the 256mb dimm for one of 512s I have lying around myself.
If you want to hang on I'll report back in February (assuming it meets the jan29 ship date as promised, which I somehow doubt...) on how how easy/hard it is to shell the thing and get at it's guts, But I'm sure there'll be plenty of folks besides me dismantling them.
 
MartinX said:
It'd be kind of stupid (and expensive) to design new standards for a low-cost machine like that, so I reckon it's user swappable.

However.

Looking at the picture on the Apple website, in the design section of the mac minis marketing stuff, it looks like the unit is held together with lots of plastic teeth, rather than screws, so opening it without doing damage might be tricky, but it must be do-able.

On the applestores various bits it only specifically says that the the airport/bluetooth component is not user swappable, which would be a strange thing to say if none of the other traditionally swappable components were replaceable as well.

I've gone ahead and ordered the base model with AE, I'm planning on swapping out the 256mb dimm for one of 512s I have lying around myself.
If you want to hang on I'll report back in February (assuming it meets the jan29 ship date as promised, which I somehow doubt...) on how how easy/hard it is to shell the thing and get at it's guts, But I'm sure there'll be plenty of folks besides me dismantling them.
Click to expand...




Yeah let us know, i'm interested in picking one up and putting a gb in it, but i'm no tabout to drop 400 bucks on that.
 
as soon as I get the manuals on it I will see about the drive. I know the RAM is a user install part but it will depend on the layout for the drive. I could see it being mounted UNDER the mlb and in that case it would be "interesting" to swap it out easily
 
do you need special ram for this, or can i just drop one of my own sticks of pc2700 from my pc in there?
 
MartinX said:
Looking at the picture on the Apple website, in the design section of the mac minis marketing stuff, it looks like the unit is held together with lots of plastic teeth, rather than screws, so opening it without doing damage might be tricky, but it must be do-able.
Click to expand...

On further inspection, I think it'd actually be quite easy to take apart, the teeth go across the front and down the sides, but not the back, so slightly bending the aluminium sleeve from the back and working around the sides would probably disengage the teeth/clips without too much trauma.
The only trick would be getting the initial grip on the aluminium without denting it.

We'll see.
 
looks like it takes PC2700 DDR333 SDRAM so no low profile SODIMMs and on Crucial they have the RAM for $222/1Gig and $81/512Meg
 
ok.. my dad is seriously looking at one of those.. and the main question is the ram.. will it, or won't it void the warranty? that $400 for a gig is re-damn-diculous.. that is almost as much as the computer..

do macs have a bios? can you change memory timings? i have some pc3500 and i want to know if dropping it in there will let it run 2-2-2 @ pc2700. or what the deal would be..

finally.. this is a seperate topic, but what does the psu look like on those? i know it is external, but now big is it..?
 
You may as well get the 512MB upgrade from Apple instead of buying it seperately, because there's only one slot and you HAVE to buy it with at least 256MB. Why pay Crucial $81 when you can get it from Apple for $75?

You cannot get the Mac cheaper by opting for no RAM, so this is a rare instance where Apple's RAM configuration is the better deal, simply because there is only one memory slot to work with.

Of course, you could always get the Crucial and use that 256MB stick for something else...if that capacity is still worth it to you
 
I'm going to look forward to reports on user upgrades on the iMac Mini. I really want to purchase it now, but I guess I will wait to see how easy it is to pry it apart.
 
Abysmal said:
You may as well get the 512MB upgrade from Apple instead of buying it seperately, because there's only one slot and you HAVE to buy it with at least 256MB. Why pay Crucial $81 when you can get it from Apple for $75?

You cannot get the Mac cheaper by opting for no RAM, so this is a rare instance where Apple's RAM configuration is the better deal, simply because there is only one memory slot to work with.

Of course, you could always get the Crucial and use that 256MB stick for something else...if that capacity is still worth it to you
Click to expand...

If I didn't already have a couple of spare 512 pc2700 sticks left over from my last upgrade I'd probably agree, but the 1gb apple price is just silly.

I don't really care about the warranty, which I'd imagine will be voided, but that ma be a consideration for others.
 
posted this in one of the other Mac Mini threads and to open the case you need a special tool and only Authorized service provders can get it which is a bummer...if you could get it open you could upgrade the HD as well as it appears to be on top of the optical drive
 
gigglebyte said:
posted this in one of the other Mac Mini threads and to open the case you need a special tool and only Authorized service provders can get it which is a bummer...if you could get it open you could upgrade the HD as well as it appears to be on top of the optical drive
Click to expand...

I can't image a tool that can't be emulated in some fashion, or an alternative opening mechanism devised.

When I first saw it and tried to figure out how you'd open it without hurting it, I reckoned a sort of fixed metal blade shaped like the bottom of the case that you sit the unit on top of and push down on the unit sliding the blade under all sides simultaneously popping the locks.

But that would be kind of unwieldy, I'm betting its a plastic spatula.
 
The thing is the hd appears to be a 2.5 inch so I mean you'd be able to max out to a 100 gig or so. When apple gets around to posting more info in gsx I'll have to look and see how hard these things are going to be to take apart.
 
scottatwittenberg said:
do macs have a bios? can you change memory timings? i have some pc3500 and i want to know if dropping it in there will let it run 2-2-2 @ pc2700. or what the deal would be..
Click to expand...

Not as you know them. They do have firmware, but not anything remotely like a BIOS. Macs use the fasted timing at the operational clock speed according to the DIMM's SPD timing table. It's rated speed is it's actual speed; you can't manually lower the timings to effectively overclock.

For example, I have two matched 512mb DIMMs of Kingston HyperX DDR500 in my SFF system. According to their SPD timing table, it runs 2-2-2-6 at DDR266, 2.5-3-3-7 at DDR333, and 3-3-3-8 at DDR 400. So one of these dimms would run at 2.5-3-3-7 in the miniMac, which is kind of a shame since I run it at 2-3-3-6 at DDR400 at stock voltage. :D You'll be best suited to find the fastest stock timings for a DDR333 stick, or perhaps refer to the timing table before buying, though it isn't always available.
 
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