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2011 Mac Mini Hard Drive Upgrade Video

Rick — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 15:27:46 +0000

We just upgraded a 2011 Apple Mac Mini to have an SSD, a second hard drive, and new RAM.

Video

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Also available on YouTube in High Definition or Standard Definition.

IMPORTANT NOTE: at 2 minutes in, you should pop the fan cable up, not forward toward us, to remove it. Some people recommend using a plastic spatula to pop it up. (Thanks to Jon in the comments for pointing out this error)

Parts List

OCZ 120 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-120G
Western Digital 1TB Blue WD10JPVT 5400RPM, 8 MB cache, 2.5 inch, 9.5MM height hard drive
Corsair 8 GB DDR3 Laptop Memory Kit CMSO8GX3M2A1333C9
Apple Mac Mini Model MC816LL/A 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 dual-core processor, AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive
Cable: Apple Part 922-9560, also called “Apple Mac Mini Server (Mid 2010) Bottom Hard Drive Server Flex Cable” or “Hard Drive Flex Cable Bottom”. We used part number 1009005 at welovemacs.com. This is sold as a kit from ifixit.com.

Alternate Parts List

The OCZ Vertex 3 is the fastest consumer SSD at the moment. Other SSD’s that you might consider include:

Highest reliability SSD: Intel 510 Series 120 GB
Best value high capacity SSD: Lexar Media Crucial 512 GB m4

The Western Digital Blue drive mentioned above is high capacity and quiet. For a faster spinning hard drive consider:

Western Digital 750TB Black WD7500BPKT 7200RPM, 16 MB cache, 2.5 inch, 9.5MM height hard drive

The dedicated graphics in the mid-tier Mac Mini make it worth it for me. But for the cheapest Mini, consider:

Apple Mac Mini MC815LL/A 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 dual-core processor, integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000, 2GB RAM, 500GB hard drive

UPDATE: My video shows adding two 9.5MM height drives. I just upgraded another Mac Mini with a 9.5MM SSD and a 12.5MM standard hard drive. As with my first upgrade, the hard drive goes in the bottom slot (the side closest to the top of the case when upright). This does fit. But first you need to slide the logic board out slightly. Be sure to remove the IR port adapter before sliding out the logic board. The OWC video shows how to do this. I used a cut up coat hanger to insert into the logic board holes and slide it out.

First Boot

Starting with a blank hard drive is easy on the 2011 Mac Mini. Hold down Command-R to boot into Lion Recovery which allows you to format the drives and download Lion over the Internet.

TRIM Support in Lion

For optimal SSD performance, enable TRIM support within OS X Lion. Grant Pannell describes the terminal commands to enable TRIM.

Photos of Upgrade

Opened

Fan Removal

WiFi Connection

Empty Drive Bay

Original Hard Drive

Drive Bay Side View 1

Drive Bay Side View 2

New Hard Drive & Cable

New Hard Drive Insertion

New SSD

New SSD & Drive Cables Attached

New RAM

Attach Fan

Mac Software Striping RAID Performance

Robert — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:42:06 +0000

The Mac OS includes software RAID options. Using the striping option, you can double your storage and greatly improve your read/write performance. But what is the true performance gain and is it worth doing?

What you need

First, you need a Mac capable of holding at least 2 drives. This is actually a problem for most Macs. Only the Mac Pro is capable of that off the shelf. The Mac Mini can be hacked to do so but it involves removing the DVD drive and soldering in a 2nd hard drive. The system I used in this test is the latest entry-level Mac Pro from early 2009.

Second, you need another hard drive. The Mac Pro can actually hold 4 but for the purposes of this test, I’m only adding 1. This Mac Pro comes with a 640GB Western Digital Caviar Blue so I purchased another identical to that. It is best to have 2 identical drives when doing striping so that both drives can be fully used. If you’re looking for Mac Mini drives, we recommend the 500GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue.

Backup original drive

In order to add the 2nd drive, you’ll need to fully backup your first drive so that you can restore it later. When creating a RAID setup, the drives will be wiped clean. If you already have a time machine backup, you can do a restore from that but I prefer using Disk Utility to do a backup and restore because it can create a fully bootable 100% identical backup that you can then restore from Disk Utility off of a Leopard boot disc. Disk Utility doesn’t word things very well. Both a backup and a restore are both under the Restore tab. When you backup, you just do a restore from your Macintosh HD to your external backup drive. If you want the backup to be bootable, be sure it is partitioned with a GUID Partition Table scheme under Options.

Add the drive

Now that your data is backed up, you can add your new drive. In the Mac Pro, this is the quickest and easiest hard drive addition ever. Simply unlatch the drive holders and slide one out. There are 4 screws already in there waiting to go into the new drive. Then you just slide in the new drive and that’s it. If you’re using a Mac Mini, you’ll need to follow this Mac Mini upgrade guide.

Create the RAID
Boot up the mac off of a Leopard disc by holding down C. Choose your language and then you’ll be able to launch Disk Utility from the top menu. Select one of the drives and go to the RAID tab. Enter the RAID Set Name to be the standard drive name Macintosh HD. Then drag both of your drives to the RAID set window. Both will show up and show the combined storage based on your RAID type. Mirroring is for a duplicate backup. Striping is for performance and extra storage. You can select Create to create the software RAID and it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Restore

If you did a time machine backup, you can go through the standard Leopard install and choose restore from time machine. If you did a disk utility backup, select your new Macintosh HD volume and go to the Restore tab. Choose your external backup drive as your source and the Macintosh HD as the destination. If you have a lot of data, this can take several hours. If all went well, your system should now be able to boot off your new striping RAID Macintosh HD volume.

Performance

Now that we’ve got our striping RAID, how does it perform? Using the Xbench disk test, the drive performance has gone from a score of 73 to 112. That’s about a 53% improvement overall. The test uses a variety of disk usage and this striping will perform differently based on exactly how the data is being used. The biggest benefit will be for large files. For example, if you use a virtual machine like VMware Fusion, the virtual RAM is written and read to the hard drive when you do a suspend or resume of the OS. The result is that with a striping RAID volume, this feels about twice as fast. Striping also combines the drives so you double the capacity.

The down side

The biggest negative is that with 2 drives required to be working, we’ve doubled the likelihood of the Macintosh HD volume failing. If just 1 drive breaks, the whole volume is lost. Fortunately, Apple provides time machine which gives us a reliable and effortless backup. If you do lose a drive, you’ll need to replace the bad drive and restart the RAID set from scratch and restore. Another downside is that because this is a software RAID, it does use a little CPU which hardware RAID would not. But a Mac Pro hardware RAID card will set you back $700 and the CPU usage is so small, I can’t even notice it when looking at Activity Monitor.

Conclusion

If you want to massively improve your disk performance, adding a second drive and creating a striping RAID set is a great choice. This is easy in a Mac Pro but can be done on a Mac Mini with some work. Just be sure you always have a time machine backup running in case your RAID fails.

2009 Mac Desktop Benchmarks

Robert — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:34:31 +0000

The latest versions of the Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro all show improvements over previous versions. Besides a few changes in connections, physically they are relatively unchanged. The main improvement is in performance.

With the upcoming release of the next Mac operating system, Snow Leopard, the threading performance of your Mac hardware is now more important than ever. Snow Leopard will be more optimized for multi-threading than any of its predecessors. The latest Mac desktops will benefit more than previous models since they outperform significantly on thread benchmarks.

The following benchmark scores were collected by the popular Xbench Mac benchmarking software. The new desktops are all of the entry level models. For all tests, a higher score is better.

Model	Thread Test	UI Test	Memory Test
2006 iMac Core 2 Duo 2GHz	171	257	133
2009 Mac Mini Core 2 Duo 2GHz	231	258	162
2009 iMac Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz	360	379	177
2009 Mac Pro Xeon 3500 2.66GHz	543	409	374

It should be no surprise that the Mac Pro performs the best. The Mac Mini has always been underpowered but at least it still outperforms some previous iMac models with similar CPU. The entry-level iMac for $1,199 posts extremely impressive results. For half the price of a Mac Pro, the thread performance was still great. However, the Mac Pro truly dominates in the memory test. The newer nehalem architecture uses tri-channel RAM which is significantly faster. Any memory intensive applications will see a big improvement on a Mac Pro. The iMac and Mac Mini won’t use nehalem until the end of 2009 at the earliest.

It is hard to highly recommend the Mac Mini just because it feels like it should come with a faster than 2GHz processor. For the first time though, you can hook up 2 monitors to the Mac Mini. The iMac offers the best value by far. It performs great and isn’t overly expensive. If you want the best performance and money is no object, the Mac Pro is for you. Once Snow Leopard comes out, the performance of these new Macs should increase significantly.

KisMAC WiFi Stumbler for Mac OS X

Rick — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:38:37 +0000

I just wrote about inSSIDer for finding and looking at your WiFi 802.11 signals from a Windows computer. Mac users should try:

KisMAC

Like inSSIDer, KisMAC is free open source software. In our experience it is the best WiFi stumbling software for the Mac, supporting all standard Mac WiFi drivers and using monitor mode and passive scanning.

KisMAC can be downloaded here.

Erasing Your Hard Drive with Apple’s Disk Utility

Rick — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:45:42 +0000

If you attach a hard drive to a Mac OS X computer, you can erase it using the built-in Disk Utility.

The cheapest way to attach an external drive is with an adapter such as this one for IDE hard drives from Newegg for about $18.

Once connected on a Mac OS X computer, click Go – Utilites – Disk Utility. From there, click on the disk you want to erase, click the Erase tab at the top, then click Security Options. This will give you the following options:

Zeroing out the data will erase it. For added security, choose the 7-Pass or 35-Pass options to overwrite the data in multiple passes. Like Darik’s Boot and Nuke utility, this will ensure that the data can not be recovered even if someone is using special forensic recovery software.

Once you choose the option you want, click Erase. That’s it.

Buy Dell, buy Mac, or build your own?

Robert — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:09:11 +0000

It is often claimed that Mac computers are simply far more expensive than their PC counterparts. Some also say you might as well buy Dell now because they are so cheap? So what is the truth? Should you buy from a big PC seller like Dell? Should you go with the stylish Mac? Or should you just buy parts and build your own computer by hand?

I am using Dell as the example of the big PC maker. Plenty of other choices exist such as HP, Acer, and Gateway that are all similarly priced. The Mac is only made by Apple. For build-your-own computers, I will be using prices based on parts from newegg.com which almost always has the lowest priced computer parts. I will target 2 different system concepts. The first will be a home desktop where you can either go with a tower that is powerful or an all-on-one solution that is easier to hookup and more stylish. The second system will be a notebook.

Tower Desktops
The most common home/office desktop computer is a tower. I designed towers from Dell and NewEgg that consisted of Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz CPUs, 4GBs of RAM, 1TB hard drives with 32MB of cache, and with video cards that were very powerful such as the GeForce 9800 GTX+ for the build-your-own computer and an ATI Radeon HD3870 for the Dell. That makes these systems almost identical as far as specifications and performance.

The resultant price for the Dell was $1674. The build-your-own was $1361. The build-your-own price assumes you already have a copy of Windows XP which allows you to buy the much cheaper Vista Home Premium Upgrade version. If you need to buy Vista Home Premium full version, that adds $128 more to the price which yields a final total of $1489. The build-your-own saves $185 and you can save even more if you already have your OS or have a copy that allows an upgrade Vista version.

Now what about the Mac? Unfortunately, Apple makes absolutely no tower in this category. This is a big complaint about Macs since this is the most common choice for home desktops. Your first Mac alternative is the very expensive Mac Pro which is overkill for almost anyone since it has server components. These higher quality server parts are also very pricey. The pricing for a Mac Pro starts at $2299 which pretty much rules it out for most sane people. Then you are left with the under powered, over priced mac mini or the iMac. The mac mini is cute and good enough for most users but the price just isn’t worth it unless you specifically need a super tiny desktop.

All-in-One Desktops
It is this design that Apple pushes as what people should want in a desktop. It is certainly simpler for most people to hook up and a more stylish and elegant solution. However, if something breaks you almost always need to get a specialist to open up this harder-to-work-with case. These tend to be more expensive as well since they include an LCD monitor and some laptop components since they are so thin.

The Dell XPS One starts at $1299. The Apple iMac starts at $1199. The iMac has a slightly faster processor but you need to add 1GB of RAM to the iMac to bring it up to the RAM of the Dell. Getting the RAM from crucial is going to add about $30 after tax and shipping which brings the comparable iMac price up to $1229. The iMac also has a better video card with dedicated memory whereas the Dell uses up some of the 2GB system RAM for video. The end result is the iMac is hardware superior in several ways so if you want to run Vista or Mac OS X on it, the iMac is clearly the way to go.

Notebooks
Apple has had huge success with their notebooks mainly because they are very sturdy yet stylish. They also include a built-in camera which has become very popular these days for video conferencing. I will compare Apple’s most popular Macbook to the Dell XPS M1330. Again, you need to get some extra RAM from crucial for the Mac bringing it’s total up to 2GB for an extra $30. It can support up to 4GB but Mac OS X simply doesn’t need that for 99% of users out there. Vista on the other hand needs all the RAM it can get. The Dell comes with 4GB probably for that very reason. The price points are then $1149 for the Dell vs $1129 for the Macbook. The Dell has one other big hardware advantage of a 320GB hard drive. The Macbook only includes a 120GB. Moving the Macbook up to 250GB adds $150. So as far as a direct hardware comparison the Dell is the better value. Despite this, Macbook sales are growing at a much greater rate than any PC notebooks because they are so well designed and have the often preferred Mac OS X.

New Macs Soon
One point that is almost always left out in comparisons is that companies like Dell are constantly adjusting their prices. Apple only changes their prices when they release a new version of a model which they typically only do every 6-8 months. The result of this disappointing practice is that Apple hardware only tends to be a good value when a new model comes out. New Macbooks are expected out next month and new iMacs and Mac Pros are also due out soon. I have often found myself having to wait many months to buy a Mac just to wait for the better hardware value. It is this and the lack of a true Mac desktop tower that are my biggest complaints about the Mac lineup.

Operating Systems
I have barely mentioned the differences between Vista and Mac OS X but they are typically the biggest reason someone goes with a Mac over a PC, despite any price advantage a PC may or may not have. Vista is sluggish and needs 3+ GB of RAM. Besides that, I don’t think it as quite as awful as many people claim. The Mac has always been the more elegant OS and that is what really keeps Mac sales growing at twice the rate of PCs. The fact that Macs can run Windows but PCs can’t run Mac OS X also make the Macs more attractive.

Conclusion
If you want a powerful yet good value home desktop tower, building it on your own is much cheaper than Dell. This is the best choice for gamers as well. There is really no Mac alternative for the tower. If you want an all-in-one desktop solution, the iMac is the clear choice. If you want a notebook, Dell has an edge on hardware but I’ve never needed 320GB in a laptop before. The MacBook’s design, sturdiness, and OS tends to put it as the best selection and it is the one I recommend. Next month’s new Mac portable lineup should strengthen their hand even further.