Finally a Wooden SATA HD and E-SATA Mini Mac

[Boony]

Finally a Wooden SATA HD and E-SATA Mini Mac.

My worst days ever, the best Intel Mac Mini MOD I did.

A wooden Sata HD as a strong connection to the internal Sata daughter board, whereby twisting the cable won't loose the internal connector.

The external E-SATA connector pops out like the DVI to VGA connector. The case has two drilled and wire tapped holes, it's extra fixed with hot glue cause the rounded case corner.

Peter Boons - Belgium

Note: Based on this concept: http://www.artmac.info/MacMiniSATAMod.html

 

[joeops57]

I wish I had the patience and talent to do stuff like that. If you don't mind me asking, what exactly does it do? I mean I know E-SATA has something to do with hard drives, I think.

~Joe

 

[Boony]

I wish I had the patience and talent to do stuff like that. If you don't mind me asking, what exactly does it do? I mean I know E-SATA has something to do with hard drives, I think.

~Joe

I think you remember the ATA Harddisk drives, those with a flat ribon cable connected to it. Now they cal them PATA or parallel ATA, cause of the many wires in the flat cable. SATA is Serial ATA and has it's own protocol of talking to a harddisk (with only 7 wires, in a semi flast rounded cable).

SATA is a new method of connecting harddisks. Now in the mac mini (intel version), the PATA hardddisk circuitery is changed to SATA. But the internal harddisk had only 5400 rpm and I find it slow-wwwwww ....

There are 7200 RPM's in this small format of HD, but ofcourse very expensive. so i needed an connector External SATA, for hooking up ESATA Drive cages or devices.

This is not only this tiny project, but this intel mini mac is connected to a G4 Case, with only 5 SATA drives in it 3,5 inch (not 2,5 like in the mini mac). One 160 GB SATA, with an E-SATA backplate. Each pair of 80 GB drives are hooked to a Firewire / USB2.0 Bridge board. And yes, they are in RAID0 configuration. If you don't know, If you can place OS X swap file to a different harddisk, your system speeds up. When you emulate a PC (with parrallels or other software), best set the drives on a seperate harddisk. When you use windows in Parrallels for example, you can make a virtual drive on another drive, which speeds up windows.

If you got one BIG harddisk, everything will be slow .... cause you have one mechanical drive arm that hoovers over the Harddisk plates ...

BTW, a little bit more patience gives more talent. Simple

 

[WeekendSailor]

Interesting Intel Mac mini External SATA Interface

Hello;

I have looked at your Web article several times recently. Understanding the mechanical requirement to extend the Intel Mac mini SATA interface is very interesting to me.
(I would like to connect to an external 3.5 inch SATA drive)

I recently added 2GB RAM to my Intel Mac mini and it was not difficult once I gained confidence that I was breaking my mini !

I need to read your description again .... about how you made the SATA connector adaptor. I believe that you had some problem the first time - I want to be sure that I understand the method that worked.

Regards;

WeekendSailor

 

[bossass]

Impressive. Nice work.

 

[zeker00]

Continuing mods...

Excellent efforts! I am wondering how one could instead go to a SATA hub ( http://www.datoptic.com/cgi-bin/web.cgi?product=SATA2_HUB&detail=yes ) and what type external drives I could use? Any assist appreciated! zeker00

 

[Maxwell Smart]

looks great! Nice work. Could you post some pics of your entire setup with the hard drives and whatnot and the G4 mini (case?) Your description was a bit hard to follow. Thanks!