The truly wonderful guys over at iFixit made an interesting discovery earlier today. It seems that the new Mac minis may actually be able to house two hard drives.
How is this possible, you may ask?
Simple, really. You see, in sticking with Apple’s ideals, Apple excluded the optical, or CD, drive on the new Mac minis. Because of that, iFixit seems to say that there is actually an extra cable to which one could, hypothetically, attach a hard drive. They also say that they are working on sourcing a hard drive to work for this, and they hope to be actually able to install a second hard drive in the latest Mac minis in the near future for anyone who would so choose.
Apple has done away with the optical drive and replaced it with some good old-fashioned emptiness. We found that hole (as well as the empty extra SATA connection on the logic board) to be perfect for adding a secondary hard drive — essentially bypassing the $400 premium over the “server” model. The only snag in this master plan is being able to find another hard drive cable to hook it up to the logic board, something we’ll work on sourcing.
To me, this all screams two things:
1. The ridiculous size of PC towers, and even some laptops, is super unnecessary. I mean, if you can get two hard drives — along with all the other components — into a tiny little box, you can make a desktop or laptop smaller. (Although I will say that Apple has always been exceedingly good at this, and thus, perhaps posseses some secret sauce here, so to speak.)
2. These new Mac minis are powerful little things.
