Mark Mischke's Weblog

Mac mini optical drive upgrade

As an easy and inexpensive way to complete three of my four intended base-model Mac mini upgrades, I purchased a Pioneer DVR-K06L optical drive (SuperDrive equivalent) from Other World Computing. This unit has the required Mac firmware, and they'll even buy my stock mini Combo drive back for $20. Once again I followed OWC's excellent installation instructions. The process took about ten minutes.

Thus far, the mini has been running fast, cool and almost completely silent. I've been monitoring the CPU temperature and load using CoreDuoTemp and I range between high-30s and low 40s (°C) under low load and between mid-40s and upper-50s under higher loads.

These three modifications were much easier than the final one will be - upgrading the CPU. Even that won't be too bad, though. The tricky part is applying the right amount of thermal paste between the CPU die and the heat sink. I've been down that road a few times before with Pentium III and IV boxes, so I don't anticipate any problems. I'm still quite pleased with the performance of the stock 1.66 GHz Core Duo. A 2.0 or 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo should really smoke, although hopefully not in a literal sense. :-)

Mac mini hard drive upgrade

Phase two of my Mac mini mods involved swapping out the standard 60 GB 5400 RPM hard drive for a 100 GB 7200 RPM unit. As before, I followed the excellent instructional video from Other World Computing.

I chose the Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 (HTS721010G9SA00) drive. Installation was as easy as the memory upgrade. Once you've taken the mini apart a few times, there's nothing to it. I didn't do before-and-after XBench runs, but the machine certainly feels quicker now. The mini is just as quiet as it was with the old drive. It's nearly inaudible and doesn't seem to run any hotter, either.

Now I have enough room to split the disk into two partitions and dual-boot OS X and Windows XP (courtesy of Apple's Boot Camp). I'll report on this once I get around to setting it up.

Phases three and four will involve upgrading the CPU to a >= 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo w/4 MB cache and a SuperDrive, not necessarily in that order. I want to live with it as-is for awhile in order to guage the effect of the drive upgrade over time. Plus, the 1.67 GHz Core Duo which came standard on the mini is no slouch. The SuperDrive is more a convenience than anything else. It'll allow me to burn DVDs.