DIY Upgrades

I thought I’d make a thread on DIY upgrades as I’m about to embark on a few projects.

The first couple I did yesterday.

Before:
1 x 3 Tb Seagate HDD in external Thunderbolt LaCie
4 x 1 Tb Hitachi HDDs in external Thunderbolt Promise Pegasus RAID

I bought from Warehouse1:
1 x 6 Tb Seagate HDD
3 x 3 Tb Seagate HDDs

Last night I did the upgrade on my kitchen table:

I bought the same Seagate 3 Tb HDD as the one in the LaCie, and what I did was move that into the RAID, and replace it with the 6 Tb.

After:
1 x 6 Tb Seagate HDD in external Thunderbolt LaCie
4 x 3 Tb Seagate HDDs in external Thunderbolt Promise Pegasus RAID

(Total of 18Tb - but I will run the 4 x 3Tb in RAID 10, so I will end up having 6 Tb + 6 Tb = 12 Tb).

I now have 4 x 1Tb Hitachis left over, that are dated May 2012.

Anyone looking to buy a set of 1Tb 7200 SATA-3 drives?

Anyway, about to upgrade my internal 1 Tb HDD in my Mac Mini to a 2nd 256Gb SSD (as a second backup boot disk) - waiting for delivery of disk and tools from Ramcity - will post about that in the next couple of days.

Ok, I just did the SSD upgrade on my Mac Mini.

Late 2012 Quad Core 2.66Ghz came with original Apple 1Tb HDD and 256Gb SSD.

I wanted to replace the HDD with another SSD. I did my research and found Angelbird branded SSDs on RamCity - they are the only 3rd party SSDs that are able to use the native Apple TRIM. I got the 256Gb one, as this SSD was only going to be a clone of the boot disk.

I also needed tools - which I also got from RamCity - the iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit

Lastly, as I have never done this before, I needed a good tutorial - and the iFixit site had a good one - I got set up, and was ready to go!

Opened the bottom of the Mac Mini… so far so good, seems quite easy…

Wow things are cramped in there… praying that the HDD is the one closest to the base…

In the end, it wasn’t!

I had to completely unscrew and push out the logic board, to get to the other drive…

Suffice to say, the whole process took an hour and a half - and taking things out was easier than putting them back again… after packing everything back in, it was tough trying to line up the screw holes…

I was really worried that the Mac Mini wouldn’t boot up again, that I had shorted something, as I had a robust time with the tools pushing and pulling the drives in and out.

But success!

And as you can see, the Angelbird drive appears to OSX as a native Apple drive, with native Apple TRIM support. Interesting!

Hope you enjoyed the pics. Sorry, I was too frustrated in the middle of the process to take more photos, and only remembered right at the end. So there you have it… my Mac Mini now has 2 x 256Gb SSDs!

Sudo trimforce enable in terminal allows TRIM to run on any ssd that supports it in OS X.

I have a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB, Transcend 256GB, and OWC 3G 240 GB and 60GB. All have been running TRIM for quite a while with this command

Thanks, I was aware, the interesting thing is that the Angelbird ssd is the first 3rd party one that uses the native Mac trim automatically without sudoforce.

Yeah, I think it is because they spoof the device ID of the genuine drives. If apple cared, they could in theory change the way OSX recognises their drives, which would in theory leave the angelbirds high and drive without TRIM automatically, but I’m not sure Apple care enough about it to make it an issue.