[rescue] WTB: Intel C2D Mac Mini

[Lionel Peterson]

On Feb 20, 2009, at 1:47 PM, nate at portents.com wrote:

>> I was just wondering the other day if you could fit a WD Velociraptor
>> inside of a mac mini if you removed it's heatsink, and further if the
>> drive would survive inside there or overheat.  That would make a very
>> nice desktop machine if it would fit and work.
>
> WD Velociraptor is 15mm high, which is normal for SAS 2.5" enterprise
> drives, but abnormal for notebook SATA drives which are 9.5mm typical.
> Therefore unlikely to fit in a Mini.  (You'd also violate the WD  
> warranty
> by using it without the heatsink.)
>
> However, if drive performance is important, just use an external 3.5"
> drive in an enclosure - problem solved!  You can boot off it, it's not
> like most silly PCs that have issues with a lot of external driver
> interfaces and booting.  They even make some enclosures to match the  
> Mini
> footprint, so it just makes it a bit higher.

My Mini will sit on top of an IO Gear 4 port USB KVM (regretably, it  
is VGA not DVI), with my quad-core desktop and two Hyper-V servers  
attached to the KVM. The Mini will have a Verbatim 1 TB FireWire 400  
drive attached.

Since the mini already has 1 Gig of RAM, I'll probably leave the 4200  
RPM drive in-place, rather than crack the case just for a bigger boot  
drive...

Lionel