Replacing the disk
Yesterday, Andy and I opened up his MacMini in order to replace the optical drive with a SSD. Actually, his HDD switched over to the optical bay, and the new SSD was placed in the harddrive bay.
I went quite smooth, the only special thing you need is the “Mac-Mini-Logic-Board-Removal-Tool”. It´s a piece of thick wire bent the right way, and it is worth every penny (6,95€), unless you buy it directly from Apple (39,95€).
Don´t forget to have a set of screwdrivers laying around as there are funny star shaped screws in the MacMini!
I was also using a “spudger” for the first time. It´s also a good tool to keep around.
We followed the instructions at iFixit: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+mini+Model+A1347+Optical+Drive+Replacement/3167/1
This video is also an excellent guide:
Fusion Drive
Since Andy was updating to Mountain Lion anyways, we decided to fuse his 2 disks together as a FusionDrive.
It is actually very easy! especially when you´re reinstalling anyways.
You can read all about it at hrdwrk. This is also the shop where Andy bought the hard drive bay, that you need in order to replace the optical drive and convert it to an external drive.
basically you need 3 commands:
diskutil list
to identify the disk identifier of the disks you want to fuse together
diskutil cs create FusionDrive disk0 disk1
to fuse disk0 and disk1 (please exchange the names according to your setup!!!)
diskutil cs list
to find your fusionDrive identifier
diskutil coreStorage createVolume