I love my Mac Mini but really the specs of the machine are a little on the low side, which I suppose is fair enough as it is pitched at switchers. Those getting into a Mac for the first time generally want a basic, cheap pc and already have all the other necessities like keyboard, monitor etc.

My Mac Mini came with 1Gb of RAM and a 80Gb hard disk, not really a lot of space for the modern desktop.  Almost immediately after getting the mini I upgraded the RAM, doubling it and now the latest upgrade… the hard disk…..

As mentioned the HDD in the mini is pretty measly at 80Gb so I recently upgraded to a Seagate momentus 320Gb which is more in the ball park for what I need. Due to the form factor of the Mac Mini I felt it not advisable to upgrade to a fast 7200rpm as the heat dispersed from the drive might be a little too much for the mini to handle so I went for the 5400rpm which is the speed of the original drive.

Installing the new drive

The minis shape and size making replacing the hdd a little more time consuming than the standard desktop replacement but on the whole is not too difficult to do.  I will not go through all the process of installing the drive as there are many better guides out there, I have used this one intel mac mini take apart guide.

Restoring from Time Machine

The best part of the whole process was reinstalling all my data over to the new hard drive.  This was made ridiculously easy with Apples Time Machine which is used to keep back-ups of all you data.

Before I replaced the drive I made sure to back up all my important info just in case something went wrong. After the drive was installed I popped in my Leopard OSX install disk went to utilities and formatted the new drive with disk utility. Next up I chose to install from a time machine backup which was located on my external drive and the OS promptly told me it would take about 2 hours to restore the system.

In reality the drive was restored in about an hour and a half, easy, very simple and restored without any problems. I was totally amazed I have my system back exactly as I left it which saved hours of getting the system installed with all my software and all my data. The only program that complained was iTunes but this was very minor as all I had to do was re-authorise the computer to play itunes content.

I am a Time Machine fan, it makes backups of your system extremely easy and if for any reason your drive fails, you have your system up and running again in no time.