New hard drives in 2010 Mac Mini - max combined size?

[Osamede]

The boot drive in my 2010 Mac Mini Server Edition has gone belly up and needs to be replaced. It’s been a while since I bought it and I can’t remember what the exact limits are on combined thickness of the drives in the two available slots.

Only one drive is dead, but my initial thought is if I’m going to be opening the thing up and mucking about in there, I might as well upgrade both drives. It came with 2x500 gb onboard, which was good back then, but times have moved on quite a bit.

However I want one of the new drives to be an SSD., ideally a 1TB SSD such as the Crucial M550 or Crucial BX 100.

Question is: assuming an SSD in one slot, what’s the biggest physical thickness possible for the second drive? For that slot, I’m looking at the WD Mobile Green 2TB. This is a 15mm height and am wondering if the combined height would be doable.

 

[paulrbeers]

The boot drive in my 2010 Mac Mini Server Edition has gone belly up and needs to be replaced. It’s been a while since I bought it and I can’t remember what the exact limits are on combined thickness of the drives in the two available slots.

Only one drive is dead, but my initial thought is if I’m going to be opening the thing up and mucking about in there, I might as well upgrade both drives. It came with 2x500 gb onboard, which was good back then, but times have moved on quite a bit.

However I want one of the new drives to be an SSD., ideally a 1TB SSD such as the Crucial M550 or Crucial BX 100.

Question is: assuming an SSD in one slot, what’s the biggest physical thickness possible for the second drive? For that slot, I’m looking at the WD Mobile Green 2TB. This is a 15mm height and am wondering if the combined height would be doable.

iFixit has a tear down and I think it is roughly 21-22mm inside the case. If you don't care about getting the hard drives to actually mount (instead you just want them to float), some have used 1-7mm SSD and 1-12.5mm Mechancial. I don't think anyone has gotten a 7mm SSD and a 15mm Mechanical in there, but I could be wrong. In order to properly mount you need to use drives of 9.5mm or smaller. With that said, both of my 2012's have SSD's just floating inside and has never been an issue (but then Mechanicals would be of more concern since they have actual moving parts).

Edit: I lied. Looks like it is 26mm, so a 15mm and a 7mm SSD should fit fine...

https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/lR1QgnCGH5qWSqVW.huge

 

[Osamede]

Looks promising - thanks for the info!