Turbocharging the Mac Mini
I nabbed one of the first Intel Mac Minis as soon as they came out. Ever since, I've been wanting to boost the performance of this cool little computer.
The bottleneck, in my mind, has always been the internal laptop drive. I mulled over the idea of ripping the internal drive out and jerry-rigging some sort of eSata cable and booting it off an external desktop drive.
Now that SSDs have come down significantly in price (I got my 60GB drive for around 200 CDN), it seemed like a much better way to boost performance than a fugly hack.
So, following the disassembly instructions at MacSales, I popped in an SSD and reinstalled the OS followed by a migration of apps and data from the old hard drive.
And guess what, my Mac Mini now runs faster than my first generation Intel iMac!
The bottleneck, in my mind, has always been the internal laptop drive. I mulled over the idea of ripping the internal drive out and jerry-rigging some sort of eSata cable and booting it off an external desktop drive.
Now that SSDs have come down significantly in price (I got my 60GB drive for around 200 CDN), it seemed like a much better way to boost performance than a fugly hack.
So, following the disassembly instructions at MacSales, I popped in an SSD and reinstalled the OS followed by a migration of apps and data from the old hard drive.
And guess what, my Mac Mini now runs faster than my first generation Intel iMac!