Skip to main content

Intel 520 SSD upgrade on unibody Mac Mini - mid 2011

With the SSD prices dropping significantly in last few weeks, I couldn't resist the temptation to open up my Intel Mac Mini (unibody mid 2011 model) and pop in one.
Although, Apple prohibits users to upgrade anything apart from the RAM, I love voiding warranties. Apple uses a proprietary connector to hook up the SATA disk. Fortunately the people at Other World Computing and iFixit are selling DIY second hard disk installation kit with nicely made video tutorials. iFixit, was showing out of stock, which made my task of choosing, whom to order from, much easier. For the SSD I went with 240 GB one from the trusted and reliable Intel 520 series.
Some, Mac users were cursing at SSDs from other brands at various forums, though it wasn't very clear whether the problem was with the competence of the SSD manufactures in making their products compatible with Apple (or vice versa) or with the incompetence of the users performing the DIY upgrades! Anyway, most were satisfied with this particulars series, so I just decided to play safe. 

 The video tutorials from both the sites are pretty comprehensive, so I am not bothering to add any more jabberings! Just dumping some pics that I had taken during the process!
















Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making inactve USB Hard Disk spin down automatically in Linux.

I have a 400GB Seagate IDE HDD connected to Mars, our hostel's file-server using an USB enclosure. The USB enclosure is a cheap "Made in China" product. Consequently it has some special "features". One such notable "feature" is that the disk is kept spinning by the controller even if there has been no disk I/O for a long time. I have three other USB disks connected to the same machine, a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk External Drive, a 500GB Maxtor Basics External Drive and a 2.5" 60GB Fujitsu SATA Disk inside a Transcend USB enclosure. All of these spin down themselves if there has been no I/O for sometime. Keeping the hard disk spinning unnecessarily for ever, not only wastes power but also overheats the drive, thereby reducing its life. I tried noflushd, which is supposed to force idle hard disks to spin down, but found it to be of no help. USB enclosure generally work by performing an SCSI emulation over USB. sdparm is an utility which can be use
6 comments
Read more

Force an application to use VPN, using iptables in Linux

Enforcing an application, for example a torrent client like Transmission , to always use the VPN interface or any particular network interface for that matter, is trivially simple using iptables on Debian, Ubuntu or any other GNU/Linux distro. Personally, I am running Debian Sid on the Raspberry Pi . Occasionally I use it for downloading files ( legal stuff, seriously, believe me :D  ) using Transmission Bittorrent client over a VPN connection. Sometimes it happens that the VPN connection fails and doesn't reconnect for whatever reason and Transmission continues pulling stuff directly over my internet connection, which I would like to avoid. Fortunately it is very straightforward to enforce rules based on application owner UID. Transmission runs under the owner debian-transmission in Debian (use htop to check this) and the following two lines of iptables ensures that any process with owner having UID, debian-transmission , will not use any other network interface apart from the
9 comments
Read more

Rendering LaTeX in Blogger.

Rendering LaTeX in Blogger is pretty easy thanks to the JavaScript LaTeX equation render engine from http://www.yourequations.com . To enable LaTeX rendering go to the Blogger Dashboard --> Layout --> Edit HTML . Then add the line <script> type="text/javascript" src="http://tex.yourequations.com/"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://tex.yourequations.com/"></script> just before <body/> . Half the job is now done. Then, for example to render: \int_{0}^{\pi}\frac{x^{4}\left(1-x\right)^{4}}{1+x^{2}}dx =\frac{22}{7}-\pi Use the code: <pre lang="eq.latex"> \int_{0}^{1}\frac{x^{4}\left(1-x\right)^{4}}{1+x^{2}}dx =\frac{22}{7}-\pi </pre> The LaTeX code will now be displayed as: \int_{0}^{1}\frac{x^{4}\left(1-x\right)^{4}}{1+x^{2}}dx=\frac{22}{7}-\pi Ofcourse Javascript needs to be enabled in the Browser for the renderer to work.
9 comments
Read more