Boost your Mac mini's performance by using a 3.5-inch hard drive

The Mac mini keeps it's trim, girlish figure by using a 2.5-inch notebook hard drive instead of a standard 3.5-inch desktop drive inside. But that space-saving drive, while adequate for the needs of most people, is a little pokey for power users, not to mention expensive if you want to upgrade to a 100GB, which is the largest notebook drive readily available today. And even 100GB isn't enough for a lot of people

You can get a nice boost by running your Mac mini from a large, fast, external Firewire drive instead of the slow, puny internal drive. Or you could go one step further and get even better performace by going the hacker route deftly detailed by Arthur Whalem for the Arizona Macintosh Users Group (AMUG).

Using a $23 IDE adapter you can connect a 3.5-inch drive internally (replacing the 2.5-inch drive completely) and get around the space constraints by housing the drive externally. Believe me, it sounds more complicated then it actually is and Arthur does a fine job of documenting the process and the results.

Using Arthur's method, you will gain a significant increase in performance for a very reasonable price. If you try this at home - or you've already done it - let us know how it's working out for you!

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The Mac mini keeps it's trim, girlish figure by using a 2.5-inch notebook hard drive instead of a standard 3.5-inch desktop drive inside....

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Catalin

Kindly request from you to tell me whqt type of adapeter is and whi is mnufacturing it ? Where I can buy it from ? Thank you very much C.

November 13 2005 at 12:09 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Laurie

Leif - Apple already did that (minus the G5). It's called a Cube :) tnkgrl - my Mac minis all have 7200RPM drives in them and it does help, but as you point out the capacity constraints - not to mention the cost of those drives - make it a tough upgrade to justify.

April 15 2005 at 3:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tnkgrl

If you don't want to change the look and feel of your Mac mini and still want similar levels of performance to this mod, just install a 7200 rpm notebook hard drive in your Mac mini! I've done this to my Mac mini with a Hitachi TravelStar 7K60 2.5" 7200 rpm 60 GB hard drive (with 8 MB buffer) and I immediatrely noticed the difference... Of course 60 GB is not a lot of storage these days, but as a startup/system/application disk it's fine - just add an external 250 GB 7200 rpm FireWire disk for your data :)

April 15 2005 at 2:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Hmmmm

Someone really needs to start selling an "upgrade" case for the mini (a "maxi" case). Something that is just a bit bigger than the mini case, is designed to mount all the pieces correctly (except for the "old" 2.5" drive) but has space for a 3.5" drive. Of course, even better would be Apple coming out with a larger mini (not TOO much larger...just enough to squeeze in a 3.5" drive...and a G5!)

April 15 2005 at 2:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply