Replace hard drive in mac mini mid 2010 upgrade#
Replace hard drive in mac mini mid 2010 pro#

So the eSATA chassis would have to go and I would need to replace it with something I could connect directly to the Mac mini, via USB-C, which meant it could be either Thunderbolt 3 or USB-3. I did look at some esata adaptors or converting the unit to Thunderbolt or USB but following extensive research, I was not confident it would all work reliably. My first idea was to retain the 5 slot drive bay, after all, it was working fine, but the problem is that it depended on having an eSATA card in a PCIe slot, which I wouldn’t have in the Mac mini or be able to fit in the Avid Thunderbolt 3 chassis as there is only one PCIe slot. There had been more drives in here in previous iterations of my set up but several rationalisations had reduced the number of drives in this chassis. This was to provide a copy of the previous version of the drive when I undertook an OS upgrade. SSD Backup Drive - This was a 1TB spinning rust drive split into two partitions so that I had a further backup of my boot drives. Then I had an external eSATA connected 5 slot drive bay, which was home for some more drives.īackup Drive 8TB - This is where I put safety copies of audio and video projects Storage 2 3TB - This drive started out as the drives on which my sound effects library and samples were kept, but it also became where all my video projects were kept tooĬrucial 512GB SSD which was a clone of the Angelbird so I always had a working clone of my boot drive in case it failed, a practice I developed when all my drives were spinning rust drives.

Replace hard drive in mac mini mid 2010 pro#

Work Drive 4TB - This is where my working Pro Tools Projects reside In my cheese-grater, I had 5 drives, 4 in the bays in the Mac Pro and one in the spare slot under the DVD drive (remember those). But what about all the drives that were in my Mac Pro cheese-grater and an external esata enclosure? That was the computer and HDX solution resolved. I settled on the Avid Thunderbolt 3 rackmount chassis as it would also house my Mac mini in a 1U enclosure. I was arranging to try both of these out when Avid announced their Desktop and Rackmount Thunderbolt 3 enclosures at NAMM 2020.

I researched Thunderbolt enclosures from Sonnet and narrowed it down to either the egfx Breakaway enclosure or the Mac mini server enclosure that would house both my Mac mini and my HDX card. However, if the Mac mini was to be my next computer, what would I do about my HDX system as there was nowhere to put my HDX card. Where Would My HDX Card Go? Which Thunderbolt Enclosure To Choose? It was clear from others that the Mac mini 2018 was no slouch, and so it was settled, the Mac mini 2018 would be my next Pro Tools computer. Having seen a number of articles praising the humble Mac mini, I researched building a system around the Mac mini we used for our power tests. That left the option to buy a secondhand Mac 6,1 trash can or a Mac mini 2018. With that in mind, looking at what computer to replace my Mac Pro cheese-grater, the end of 2019 had brought the new Mac Pro 7,1, which would make an ideal replacement for my old cheese-grater but there was no way I could justify the expense of buying the new Mac Pro. Which Computer To Choose? That Is The Question

Replace hard drive in mac mini mid 2010 upgrade#

Other than the upgrade to Dolby Atmos, everything else was pretty well OK. I did this by setting up ‘Watches’ on eBay and then waiting until the speakers I wanted, another pair of TB1s for the side surrounds and 2 pairs of DB1s for the height channels came up at a price I was happy to pay. I had already made the decision to expand my monitoring to a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos and had been acquiring more secondhand PMCs to match my existing 5.1 system. I had a 5.1 monitoring system made up from 3 PMC LB1s across the front and a pair of PMC TB1s for the surrounds, all bought secondhand giving me a real bang-for-my-buck. Looking around the studio, most of the other gear is still serves me well. The first consideration was to take a look at what I would need my studio to do over the next 3 to 5 years, to help inform what I would need to replace my trusty cheese-grater. Even though in 2016 I had upgraded my graphics card, added an SSD and in early 2019, upgraded the processors, there was no doubt that by the middle of 2020, my Mac Pro cheese-grater was no longer performing as well as I needed and the time had come to replace it, but what with?