Steps 1–27: Terabyte Drive
Tools
1.5" Thin Putty Knife
$4.95 · 7 in stock
Phillips #0 Screwdriver
$4.95 · 212 in stock
Soldering Kit
$19.95 · 44 in stock
Installing Mac mini Model A1283 Terabyte Drive
Introduction
| Difficulty: | Very difficult |
|---|
We tried to put a whopping terabyte worth of storage in a Mac mini -- and succeeded!
This guide walks you through the process of replacing the stock hard drive and optical drive with TWO 500 GB hard drives.
Warning: Although you're welcome to do this at home, this surgery is at your own risk. Make sure to back up any important data prior to working on your mini's hard drive. We'll post more information regarding heat and performance as soon as we have it available.
Tools used in this guide
Paginated Single Page Steps
Step 1
—
Terabyte Drive
We decided to see if we could stuff a full terabyte worth of storage into our new Mac mini. Why would anyone possibly want this much storage?
Bragging rights. Mac minis come with either 120, 250, or 320 GB standard. Yours has 1 TERABYTE.
Built-in Time Machine. Sure, you can hook up an external drive, but it's sure nice not to have cables everywhere.
RAID -- mirroring, striping, concatenating -- take your pick.
And seriously, with that much space, who needs an optical drive?
Step 2
We're going to:
Swap out a the existing hard drive for a 500 GB drive.
Then remove the optical drive and install another new 500 GB drive in its place.
Carefully insert a putty knife into the crevice between the top cover and bottom housing. Start on the left side first.
Gently enlarge the existing crevice by twisting the putty knife downward and away from the mini.
Repeat the prying motion until a portion of the bottom housing has been nudged upward.
Step 3
Repeat the same prying procedure on the right side.
The top cover should now be marginally separated from the bottom housing. Use your fingers to completely separate the two, starting with the I/O side of the mini.
The top cover does not have any cables attaching it to the bottom housing; it should now be completely detached from the bottom.
Does anyone know if the SATA controller supports port multiplication?
Isn't this hack available for previous minis? I've got the mini mid-2007, 2.0GHz. Thanks!
I don't think so because the previous minis the optical drive and the hard drive did differ in the interface. One had Parallel ATA and one had SATA. But if you find a matching harddrive with the right conection type you might still succeed.
Earlier minis use an IDE cd drive. This raises 2 issues.
Firstly i'm not aware of anyone who makes an adaptor/cable from the slimline IDE CD connector in the mini to a hard drive (there are plenty of adaptors for connecting a slimine IDE CD drive to a normal IDE cable but i've never seen one going the other way). Making a custom adaptor would be a major PITA (you would probablly have to get a custom pcb made).
Secondly 2.5 inch IDE hard drives seem to top out at 250G so the maximum you could get in such a mini would be 750G (500GB sata in place of the original hard drive and 250GB IDE in place of the CD drive).
Help! Is it possible to put in a 1 TB Sata Drive instead of two 500GB drives?
iFixit Staff
It's a notebook hard drive, and the largest drives currently available are 500 GB. Eventually they'll make notebook drives with that much capacity.
Would it be possible to connect a 3.5" internal 1TB SATA drive and just leave the case open (since it won't fit inside like a notebook drive would)?
Sorry, but WD is shipping 750GB and 1TB 2.5" drives now. And I think Toshiba has a 640GB 2.5" drive as well (19SEP09)
The largest storage of 2.5" IDE HDD is 320G.
Anyone else try this recently?
Thinking of giving it a shot on my late 2009 2.53.
I'm awaiting the slim- to regular-SATA cables (from Amazon) to do my late '09 2.53. Have a WD 640GD installed and am replacing the optical drive w/ an OCZ SSD. Follow a print version of the instructions while doing it and you'll be fine.
Cool - thanks.
SSD is a great idea!
At first the directions looked pretty hairy, but now it is just too tempting not too. Surprised that newegg didn't have the slim power sata cable in stock, so Amazon it is.
Would someone please post a link to where I can purchase the 6 pin SATA power to 4 pin Molex power cable? I've been searching for it, but can't find it anywhere. Thanks.
Ugh. Just soldered it together, only to realize my cable has a slimline SATA *female* instead of male.
Any chance you guys can post a link to the slim line version please? Thanks
Yikes! Can't seem to find it all! The key is that you need molex / slim sata MALE. Newegg and amazon have the female version, which will not work, but the male version seems to have vanished! Especially off of newegg - i can swear it was there two weeks ago but now it's not even listed.
Thoughts from the ifixit staff?
For instance, to all aspiring mini customizers, this is NOT the correct cable, and will not work:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.asp...
I can't find this cable, not one to be found. And here I sit with my Mini torn apart. Has anyone been able to locate one or do they have another suggestion?