In part I, I grabbed a shovel and prepared to dig into my brand new vault. But there are steps to take before we even get to the laborious process of filling up the vault with almost ten years of accumulated data.
Our subject is a 1.66GHz Core Duo Mac mini, circa 2006. A pretty able machine, but I’m a firm believer of the power of upgrades (as you might recall from the various surgeries I performed on my venerable PowerMac G3). The mini I acquired came with 1GB of RAM—adequate if not outstanding—and an 80GB SATA hard drive which, let’s face it, is by no means sufficient for a media vault of the magnitude I’m planning.
The mini is not one of the easiest-to-upgrade units in the Mac lineup, but with a little know-how (and a putty knife), RAM and hard drive upgrades are actually pretty straightforward. I looked around the web for a good upgrade guide, but the one I ended up using was this one from iFixIt. It’s actually for the original PowerPC-based mini, from which the Intel-based version differs slightly (but hey, they use the exact same model of putty knife that I used, so I had that going for me). Let us proceed with the operation.
The upside to using a two-year old computer is that upgrade parts are pretty darn cheap. A visit to my favorite online shopping site, Newegg.com, yielded a kit of two name-brand 1GB RAM sticks (this model’s max) for $40. On the hard drive route, I had more than a few choices, but I opted for a 320GB, 5400rpm Samsung SATA drive, giving me 200GB of extra storage space over the PowerMac’s 120GB drive.
The upgrade process went mostly smoothly, but even for someone like me, who once made a living sticking their hands into computer guts, there were a few quirks. Due to the fact that the mini I’m using had already been upgraded by its previous owners, it was (ahem) missing some rather integral screws that secure the upper disk assembly (with the optical drive and hard drive) to the logic board—it was a little heart-stopping when I pulled the case off and had the drive assembly fall into my lap. But getting it apart was the easy part (even though I accidentally yanked a couple of cables)—putting it back together would prove a little more difficult.
Getting the RAM in is a snap—literally—once you’ve got the disk assembly off, but the hard drive proved a little more difficult. Sliding it in and getting the connectors to align correctly was tricky (or, just as likely, I missed some easier way of doing it), but even so the whole process only took me about half an hour tops.
As I said, reassembling the mini turned out to be somewhat more complicated. The first time I put the case back on and booted it up, the machine started fine, but I noticed that the fan was on full speed, non-stop. Googling yielded an answer to that puzzle from none other than my colleague, Chris Breen—apparently I’d disconnected the small fan cable on the front of the mini.
But I ended up with more pressing issues before I could fix that. While installing system updates, the computer hung and after I forced a reboot, it wouldn’t start up at all—black screen, nada. So I pulled the case off again and found that the ribbon cable that connected the logic board to the disk assembly had gotten detached. Once I had that plugged in more securely (and reconnected the fan cable for a quieter, more power efficient future), the system booted up perfectly.
Of course, the hardware is only the beginning. After all, a Mac is only as good as its software. I’ll discuss what we load onto the computer in part III.
[Image via Flickr because I totally forgot to snap pictures when I had it opened up]
Sounds like fun, Dan.
Are you doing any external storage?
I am wondering why a Firewire drive wouldn't have done the job better than cracking open the Mini? I guess since the RAM was getting upgraded, the Mini was cracked open anyway, but still, why not a Firewire drive?
@Greg: For the sake of neatness, mainly-both physical and data-wise. I will be adding an external FW drive for Time Machine, meaning I'd either need two external drives or I'd have to do some partitioning (which would mean a single point of failure). Just seemed easier this way.