iFixit

The one drawback to this hack is that we removed the optical drive. Fortunately, Apple's provided an easy solution, thanks to the MacBook Air.

You can use Remote Disc to share the optical drive of a nearby Mac or PC.

Remote Disc is not activated on the Mini, but fortunately turning it on is simple. Just type the following two commands in Terminal:

• defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
• defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Restart, and you're all set.

If you're like us and Time Machine just isn't enough, you can RAID the two drives together to make a single 1 TB drive.

Instructions are elsewhere online to do this, but the basic steps are:

• Back any data up, then boot off a different startup disc.
• Format both drives as Mac OS Extended.
• Create a new 'RAID set', and add both drives to it. You can choose 'Concatenated Set', mirrored RAID 1, or striped RAID 0.
• After you create the drive array, you can copy an OS onto it from a backup (as we did), or you can install OS X from scratch.