The Mac Mini external SATA hack
So, finally as promised, here is my short picture walkthrough on how to do the Mac Mini external SATA hack.
I’ve added quite a few comments to the images.
And before you start complaining about the bad picture quality, I’ve shot the whole procedure with my non-HD DV cam, sorry. The pictures are from several takes, so they might differ at some stage.
Anyways, just click on the first image below to start the slide show - navigate by clicking the left or right side of the photo.
I hope you like it and please leave me a comment afterwards. Thanks!
Ah, one more thing if you want to try it yourself: As usual… warranty is void!
Don’t blame me, if you screw things up - even if you’ve followed the method described here precisely. It’s your fault. I won’t take any responsibility for any damage. It’s your fault. You have been warned.
List of parts used:
1x internal SATA to external SATA (not eSATA!) adapter slot bracket (board-based)
Manufacturer: DeLOCK
Part# 65115 - SATA2ADT-A3 (order @ Reichelt - AK 668)
1x internal SATA to external SATA (not eSATA!) adapter slot bracket (non board-based)
1x SATA to eSATA cable 1m (order @ Reichelt - AK SATA 0702)
1x Macpower Pleiades Super S-Combo
If you can’t get the 2nd adapter slot bracket, just get the cable and directly attach that to the adapter board and route it to the outside of the case.
As for the case modification: I’ve made a few photos to illustrate the process. However, I won’t add any comments. This is quick’n dirty work.
November 2nd, 2006 at 5:16
[...] Alright, I had this crazy idea last week: Let’s see if I can somehow route the internal SATA interface of the Mac Mini to the outside of the case so I could attach a bigger and faster external (e)SATA drive. Well, guess I wasn’t the only person with such ideas: Perle over at 123Macmini.com already has brief instructions on how he did the internal to external mod. I’ve made some refinements to his process which I will post shortly - along with a few pictures and links where to get the parts. It’s here. [...]
November 2nd, 2006 at 18:21
You’re the man. That was exactly the info I was searching for! Thanks!!
November 3rd, 2006 at 1:32
Totally awesome!!!!! Just out of curiosity, where did you purchase the Pleiades enclosure????
November 3rd, 2006 at 3:37
No idea where to get them in the U.S.. Probably at Newegg…
Rosewill ( http://tinyurl.com/yylq4r ) is offering rebranded Macpower enclosures, but the S-Combo seems to be missing.
Span.com (UK) has got them, but they are expensive:
http://tinyurl.com/yd6up5
I bought mine at Cyberport, a german retailer:
http://tinyurl.com/yhkr5a
Also, you may want to check out the G-Drives, which are similar to the Macpower enclosures:
http://www.g-technology.com
November 20th, 2006 at 21:42
Nice work Andre.
One question: How do you switch the external HD on and off? I though about master slave sockets but have some doubts if this will work with the suspend mode. Any experience?
November 20th, 2006 at 23:00
Hi Jens, thanks. :)
The system is running 24/7. However, if I turn off the Mac Mini or put it into sleep mode, the external HD will spin down.
To be honest, I have no idea if a master slave outlet will work because I don’t own one. But from my experience I can tell it’s no problem if the HD is powered on a second or two later than the system, which might be the case if you’re using such an outlet.
November 21st, 2006 at 21:50
” To be honest, I have no idea if a master slave outlet will work because I don’t own one. But from my experience I can tell it’s no problem if the HD is powered on a second or two later than the system, which might be the case if you’re using such an outlet. ”
Master / Slave outlet won’t work, surely when the Intel Mac Mini is on the master outlet. The difference in the current when powered on, is too less to fine-tune a master / Slave outlet.
My apple build HD case is on the Master Outlet to turn on power for: Mac mini power brick, Monitor, speakers. I have to push the Intel Mac Mini button at the back afterwards.
Lara
December 15th, 2006 at 17:49
Nice work. I was wondering why Apple didn’t include eSATA support. Thanks for the pictorial steps.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:41
Hello. Do you think it might be possible to add an eSATA socket without disconnecting the stock SATA drive? That is, so that you can use the internal SATA drive, and also plug in an external eSATA drive in the same way you can plug in an external Firewire or USB drive?
I can’t think of one.
March 28th, 2007 at 20:30
@Damian,
When I’ve builded my system I’ve thought about a port multiplier described at:
http://www.sata-io.org/portmultiplier.asp
The question is: Has the mac mini a 1,5 or 3 Gbps Sata-bridge build in.
And, can it work with a port multiplier placed in my HD-mac-box. This SIte demonstrate a parrallel access to more drive (by the multiplier). But as you can see, I thins dependent on the Sata-build-in the Mac mini, you need the command from the internal Sata-bridge (mac mini) to drive the multiplier.
http://www.sata-io.org/portmultiplier.asp
Notes also, that the multiplier without the needed command act as a selector, so a drive at the time …
Difficult to explain, but read it . . . Maybe it’s pssible
Lara
March 28th, 2007 at 20:32
It’s about a FIS commmand that must be enbaled in the Sata-bridge in the mac mini. Also it has todo with the Sata version . . . and the OS ofcourse
Lara
March 30th, 2007 at 7:25
@ Lara
Oh, that’s an interesting possibility. Thanks.
Damian
April 10th, 2007 at 19:57
What’s the chance this will work with the Apple TV?
July 8th, 2007 at 16:02
Hi
I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don’t have anything to say recently.
Bye
October 10th, 2007 at 2:19
In image 11 you say we need an adapter that has female sockets at both ends……I think you mean type L male sockets at both ends? I think its called a male to male coupler or bridge. This may work, halfway down this page:
http://www.cs-electronics.com/serial-ata.htm
And a big picture showing its a type L, not a type I.
http://www.cs-electronics.com/images-large/SATA-7M7M.jpg
I guess you’re in Germany. I’m in Canada and have not found any seller in the entire country that has it. US sellers don’t want to ship across the border to me. I feel so rejected! AARRGGHHH!! :)
October 12th, 2007 at 2:28
Cooldrives.com sells a Type L Male to Female Sata cable (red) that should work perfectly for $5 plus a little shipping.
http://cooldrives.com/sacaexsa7sic.html
Another option is this:
http://www.mcpb.com/html/sta2.ie1x.cbl.html
With both of these you’ll have to grind down the male plug a bit.
But is it possible to power the 3.5″ drive from the power receptacle of the Mini that originally powered the 2.5″? Its to the left of the data plug of course. Then you could make it sleep and do other stuff I guess. I wonder if the power requirements of a 3.5″ are very different from a 2.5″? And if so, would it relieve the power supply somewhat if you removed the slot loading drive and ran the DVD drive externally? After all, most people don’t use the DVD drive very often.
As for the exiting of the Sata cable out of the Mini: If you don’t want to hack a hole in your Mini, why not just Leave the back not completely closed allowing for about 1/16″ gap for the Sata cable to pass through? It should look the same from the front. Its kind of a shame to gouge something if its not really necessary. And hey, maybe it will run a little cooler.
And has anyone tried replacing the CPU heatsink with a chipset heatsink off a typical PC? Thermaltake 05 might work OK. The footprint looks small enough and one of the mounting brackets could fit if both mounting holes are filed a tiny bit to make them slightly longer. Of course then you couldn’t run it with the top on but once again, you wouldn’t destroy your warranty as you could replace the original heatsink and hard drive if you needed to bring it in for service. Its no small consideration if you’ve paid for 3 years of Apple Care.
October 14th, 2007 at 19:54
@MEME: Just work out the sata-data part outwards the Mac-mini case. And try to replace the litlle HD in the Mac-mini with a dummy. This because a guy from the nederlands heated up iets Mac-mini. Second. Make a new HD case where the SATA HD will fit in. Use a Seperate power-supply instaed of working a power cable out of your new mac-mini. Imagine using a 10.000 RPM drive on the internela power of your mac-mini. The chance is you will blow up the circuit-board in your Mac-mini.
So, route only the Data part of the sata out of the mac-mini, and place the new SATA hd in a powered HD case case, or your own D.I.Y. case.
Lara Boons
October 19th, 2007 at 6:46
After looking at the Mini, I can’t imagine having the hard drive in there helps any heat issues. The Mac Mini is a terrible design in cooling. When I first got it I couldn’t believe how hot the exiting air was. Then I realized they have the CPU, Video chip, and hard drive, as well as the optical drive all crammed in there generating heat. And a 2″ fan is supposed to adequately cool that? (I don’t think so!). In my old mini which I run without a top it runs totally cool. No hard drive, no optical drive of course. No top.
With the Intel model I turned it no without the CPU fan connected and the cpu heatsink hardly got warm at all. So nice. It might even be possible to position a 120 mm fan on to the MIni and it might be enough to cool everything.
But my question was more leaning towards using a typical Sata 3.5″ 7200 rpm drive. Without the optical drive being powered by the MIni I wonder if it would work? And I wonder if there are any male Sata power adaptors that connect to a female Sata or LP4 (traditional IDE type 4 pin Molex connector) male connector? I quick Google didn’t bring up anything. Being able to sleep is quite nice for a lot of people. It would be nice if the Mini could control that.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:53
[...]will it work with the Apple TV?[...]
December 23rd, 2007 at 18:46
Just wondering, how much would I have to pay you to mod a new mac mini for me? Just curious!
March 20th, 2008 at 3:24
Hello,
I was wonder if anyone knows were to buy a cable like:
Male SATA 7-Pin DATA to Female ESATA 7-Pin Cable 20inch ?
With these will be easy to hack the mac mini :)
Thanks
April 7th, 2008 at 0:30
Have you tried RAID 0(2 external S-ATA drive)?
Wondering if it’s possible.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:38
Help… just purchased a miniStack V3.
I cloned my internal disk with DiskDuper. The miniStack V3 boots fine under firewire.
But when I removed my internal hard disk from my mac mini and connected the sata connector from the ministack v3’s internal oxford board directly to the Mac mini’s internal L sata connection (as described - I used modified sata cable) - it does not boot via sata/esata.
It continues to boot fine with fireware. Do I need to enable some form of sata bridging function to allow booting esata in this configuration in the miniStack V3?
I am running Leopard 10.5.2. No other drives except the internal DVD.
April 21st, 2008 at 0:05
Hello stwoods,
First of all, The mac-mini can boot from E-sata you build, but the harddisk must first spinning and powered on in the external case.
Second, there must sometime to boot on the E-sata connection.
Third, maybe change the boot-order in the system panel
Lara Boons
June 11th, 2008 at 15:25
I’m now using the Intel Mini on its side, with one 120mm fan (@ 12 volts) cooling everything. The fan sits on the table in front of the Mini. I removed the plastic housing that held the fan, hard drive, etc. It runs so cool now as the fan now oools the entire board (CPU, chipset, ram, etc)! The system never gets above about 35C and usually the CPU temp is only about 5C above ambient. (Right now its 22C with ambient about 17C). I can’t even hear it if I’m a few feet away. And it never ramps up like the 2″ fan does when its under load. The same generic ATX power supply that powers the hard drive also powers the fan. You can add another 120mm fan to cool your hard drive as well of course. I don’t have my hard drive in the typical cramped external case that most external hard drives are stuffed into so my hard drive temps are low.
I’d sure love to be able to run two or four 10k 16mb Sata WD Raptors in Raid 0 on this thing. Guess that’s not possible yet though. If Apple had put a eSata jack with port replication on this thing, just imagine the performance and storage possibilities one would have. They could have sold so many external Sata enclosures for it as well.
I next tried a 10000rpm Sata Western Digital Raptor hard drive for the OS and Applications/Programs. Wonderful. I leave all my data on a firewire external drive. Its really zippy. You can use a 36gb, 74gb or 150gb. They come in 8mb or 16mb cache versions. All are reasonably priced if you buy them used. They have a long lifetime expectation - so they are very reliable. Highly recommended.
Next is replacing the Core Solo 1.5ghz CPU with a Core2Duo CPU.
I’d love to overclock the Core2Duo CPU but I haven’t read about anyone that had done it yet. It shouldn’t be difficult mounting a quality heat pipe designed heat sink (Scythe, Thermalright, Tuniq, etc) on it with some fiddling. With that plastic housing gone (that used to hold the optical drive, hard drive and fan), there is much more room to work.
Oh…if you’re not using the PCI-E wireless card, remove it. Just one more thing in the way.
July 8th, 2008 at 17:49
Hello,
Thanks for this how to.
I try to found the adapter, but I can not.
I’m in France and
http://www.reichelt.de/?;ACTION=3;LA=4;GROUP=C694;GROUPID=3337;ARTICLE=50855;START=0;SORT=artnr;OFFSET=16;SID=27VpCceawQARsAAAcdH@I7784fc2879a36ee7ad1fb97e7dcd8645
web site is in german
http://cooldrives.com/2saintosaexp.html
web site do not deliver out of US :(
Somebody can help me ?
Thks
July 8th, 2008 at 18:02
Hello,
Thanks for this how to.
I try to found the adapter, but I can not.
I’m in France and
http://www.reichelt.de/?;ACTION=3;LA=4;GROUP=C694;GROUPID=3337;ARTICLE=50855;START=0;SORT=artnr;OFFSET=16;SID=27VpCceawQARsAAAcdH@I7784fc2879a36ee7ad1fb97e7dcd8645
web site is in German
http://cooldrives.com/2saintosaexp.html
web site do not deliver out of US :(
Another one : http://3logic.ru/?A=5&SI=1&I=12434
Somebody can help me ?
Thks
August 22nd, 2008 at 16:02
I found this site that may have the correct parts -
http://www.cpustuff.com/Serial-ATA-Adapter-p-1-c-277.html
I’m think that these 2 adapters should work work for this mod -
http://www.cpustuff.com/7-Pin-Male-Male-Serial-ATA-Data-Adapter.-7MALE2M-p-16190.html
http://www.cpustuff.com/22-Pin-Male-Male-Serial-ATA-Data-and-Power-Adapter.-22MALE2-p-339.html
Don’t know if they do international sales. I’ll order them and give it a try and report back here with the results.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:40
Well, the parts arrived yesterday and today, using the 22 Pin Male - Male Serial ATA Data and Power Adapter (http://www.cpustuff.com/22-Pin-Male-Male-Serial-ATA-Data-and-Power-Adapter.-22MALE2-p-339.html), a female SATA to eSATA cable, i was able to complete this hack and have my Mac mini boot from an external SATA drive.
I’m pretty sure the 7 Pin Male - Male Serial ATA Data Adapter would have worked also, but it would have been more difficult to secure the adapter and cable to the riser board. The 22 Pin Male - Male Serial ATA Data and Power Adapter, having more surface area was easier to secure.
Good luck to everyone else who wants to give this a try.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:09
Couple of thoughts, questions… etc.
I have the impression that the internal sata port controller doesn’t support port multiplication. Can someone verify this? I’d love to hook up a drive array to a mini.
For that matter would an external sata hub alleviate the problem? Or would it stuff be botched by the internal controller?
And lastly / most extremely.
Since as an early poster noted the PCI-e wireless card might be sacrificed… could it be possible to sub in a modded PCI-e sata card (firmtek or sonnet) that supports port multiplication?
I’m trying to figure out a nice little file server option for my home office. I have a GSpeed hooked up to my main mac, but I’d like to put the drives in a closet (less noise for me) and use gigabit ethernet for my workstations to grab/share files. The 6ft max cable for the eSata is limiting my ability to shove it in a closet as is.
Also, I just got married and I’d like to create a dope little media center for the new wife, videos and music anywhere in the house, you know.
This mini sata thread got me thinking…
I’m going to need to get my hands on a mini now, either way. Refurbs here I come!
-greg
November 3rd, 2008 at 7:25
No port replication on a Mini. That would be too smart for Apple. Give too much power to the customer. And take away some of the Mac Pro’s sales.
The PCI-E idea is great. Can you imagine the potential of that silly Mini if they had a few PCI-E slots in there? Video enhancements, eSata, etc.
Basically its like swimming up a river with Apple. They are going to try to stop the tinkering as much as they can. Better to get a simple PC, run OSX86 and XP, each on its own hard drive, and have the best of both worlds for almost no expense. Total freedom with hard drives, video, etc. Back to the real world of computing freedom.
November 3rd, 2008 at 7:27
Now who is going to try a Velociraptor on their Mini? (I’ve got one coming soon so I’ll report back when its installed.) Probably won’t make much difference though from the 10k Raptor I’m now using.
November 14th, 2008 at 0:22
do you think is it possible to realize this hack for a MacBook?
December 26th, 2008 at 9:26
Macbook? And lose all portability? If you don’t mind that, sure it should work.