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my Mac Mini gets a solid state hard drive

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2012.03.26

My wife's Macbook Air is basically the best computer I've ever seen; one of its strengths is its lightning fast hard drive.

Solid state drives based on memory chips rather than spinning discs have been around for quite some time. Now, happily, they're no longer as expensive as hell.

They're major advantage over traditional hard drives is the speed of retrieval of data. In a laptop this allows the operating system and your applications to load much, much faster—greatly making up for the typically more limited resources of a laptop (e.g. a slower CPU).

A Mac Mini is basically a laptop without a keyboard and monitor. They're very handy if you want access to the Mac operating environment but don't want (or can't afford) one of their monster deskside systems. They're also a pretty good software development platform; I know developers who use them for working from home, and currently work at a software shop where half a dozen coders have Minis on their desks.

But they're not exactly fast. That's why, when I realized that I had a spare solid state drive, that I could greatly improve the performance of the thing by installing that drive. Reading instructions like this excellent overview I decided to try it.

The only challenge out of the entire process turned out to be prizing the system case open, something you can learn from videos like this:

My notes on the process are these:

1. The system case is not attached to any of the goodies inside, it is merely clipped in place by a series of plastic hooks that go around three sides of the system. Getting the lid off is like taking a tire off of a bicycle: there will be aggravating moments where the whole things tries to fight you. Take your time, and know that yes you will leave some small marks on the plastic inner lining of the lid.

2. On my (2009) model, there are four screws in the corners that you'll need to remove. One of them is longer than the rest, try to remember into which corner that goes (it's the 'deepest' set screw, strangely). I got this wrong the first time.

3. Be sure to take care when removing the wireless network antennae (who knew that there were two!), sound subsystem, and other removables. There are three or four pieces of tape you'll need to ease off (and replace when you're rebuilding) as well as two buffer pieces that seem to be made of reinforced foam—these are found under the hard drive, I suspect they're for fighting vibrations. There is a lead that connects the far edge of the hard drive to the drive's daughter board. I don't know what electronic function this could serve, as it's not connected to the workings of the drive; I took it to be a ground or perhaps a monitor for heat or vibration. It does have a tiny electronic piece at the end of the lead. You can prize this off, and in fact have to do so to get the drive out.

4. Say goodbye to your warranty, and hello to a brand new experience with your Mini.

rand()m quote

A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to finally feel its warmth.

—African proverb