Survey of DIY mini RAM upgrades

[repeater75]

Hey all you mini owners: time to share some knowledge and firsthand experience.

I'm sure many who have moved to a mini from the PC side have some experience inside their computer and have opted to install a RAM upgrade on their mini.

For those of you who have, share a few words with the rest of us who are about to buy and let us know about your RAM upgrade so we can all benefit.

What brand? What capacity? What latency and voltage (if you know)? and Where did you buy and for How Much?

I saw a decent deal (for retail) is on this week at Best Buy for a Kingston 1GB PC2700 for $184.99 with a $35 mail-in rebate for a $150 1 Gig stick! Pretty nice deal. I'll probably go with something from NewEgg though, they have stuff with lifetime warranty for only about $137 and I need an adapter from them anyway.

 

[alexmaccoll]

Before i traded my mini for a 12" PB, i upgraded the ram to 1GB. i got it from crucial.com for $169.
CT431640 DDR PC2700 - Specs
It worked fine. The case removing technique was nerve racking though.
Let me know how you get on.
Alex

 

[repeater75]

Wow, Alex - that's quite a different bit of hardware to trade for, but great nonetheless! Thanks for the info. I have personally bought direct from Crucial before and their warranty service is excellent - I had memory fail twice and had my replacement within days.

 

[mynameis]

I have a 512mb stick of PC3200 ValueRam. I got it for $55 after rebate from Circuit City awhile back.they should ship these things with 512mb standard. A GB would be nice but personally not worth the money.

 

[EvoMac]

I upgraded my mac mini with 1gb of supertalent memory with a heatsink on it. Worked great. Taking the case off isn't too bad, just take your time and you wont have any problems. The 1gb stick I personally think is worth the extra money compared to a 512, especially since you only get 1 chance with the mini with having only 1 slot for the ram upgrade. Performance from 256 to 1gig was huge. Runs applications as well as my PC w. a P4 2.6 and 1GB of ram.

 

[01AWW18T]

Upgraded to a strip of Apacer PC3200 512Mb CAS2.5

Upgraded to 40 gig Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm drive

No problems.

 

[EvoMac]

Upgraded to 40 gig Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm drive
No problems.

That is the one upgrade that I am considering, the only thing is the cost hurts for 7200rpm laptop drives. I can get about 300gb std size drive space for what it cost for 40-60gb. I might go with a external Firewire drive, not sure yet.

 

[01AWW18T]

That is the one upgrade that I am considering, the only thing is the cost hurts for 7200rpm laptop drives. I can get about 300gb std size drive space for what it cost for 40-60gb. I might go with a external Firewire drive, not sure yet.

I sold the 80 gig seagate (4200rpm) that came with the mini on ebay and recouped the cost

 

[repeater75]

I sold the 80 gig seagate (4200rpm) that came with the mini on ebay and recouped the cost

Nice work!

I was looking at a 60GB 7200RPM drive to swap with the internal 40GB, but I have just read something I didn't know you can do with your mini.

I am switching from a PC I built that I have steadily upgraded for over 3 years. I am going to buy a firewire external case for my Western Digital 80GB hard drive for about $35 at newegg.com. What I have found out is that you can install Mac OS X to the external drive and even boot from that drive instead of the internal disk. This is actually pretty cool, because a total of 120GB of storage is not too shabby and I can just use the internal 40GB drive to store music or other files instead of installing apps to the slower disk. So, instead of $160 for the internal 60GB drive (which might not be a bad upgrade when the disks get cheaper in a year or so), I'll spring for a full gig of RAM and get the benefits of a speedy drive and maxed-out RAM.

The next thing I need to do is figure out the lowest-cost USB2 dual layer external burner that works well on the Mac. I wonder if Toast works for Dual layer burning yet? I think that would make an excellent addition. I have a year-old 4x dvdrw on my pc and I could always buy a cheap external case for that too...

 

[gdestiny]

or if you don' wanna do it yourself: http://www.fastmac.com/

upgrade 1GB, 100GB, or dual layer 8X superdrive. nice.

 

[ajags]

itloser...1gb with heatshield

itloser... what are the exact specifications of the memory you bought? where can I get that same memory with heatshield?

 

[WhyJay?]

I upgraded the ram on my mini to 512 of PC2700, Kingston ValueRam from Officemax. Getting the case ona an off wasn't too bad. the only thing I'd recommend is that you use 2 putty knives. It helps to have one holding things in place on one side while you pry open the other. I am considering upgrading to 1gb of ram and perhaps a superdrive. But I my let apple do the superdrive upgrade.

 

[mcsenerd]

I bought a 1 GB stick of Patriot PC3200 and a 60GB Hitachi 7200 RPM HD and put 'em in my mini as soon as I took it out of the box it came in...worked perfectly...and wouldn't change a thing.

 

[Echo_]

i dont think youd actually want to run your os through usb 2.0 right??

 

[Amen-Moses]

i dont think youd actually want to run your os through usb 2.0 right??

Nope, but firewire is a lot faster, even faster than USB2. 400Mbps compared to 380Mbps, that translates to around 50MBps burst transfer speeds which is more than you will get from the internal ATA system anyhow (especially with a 4800 or 5400 HD). When you also add in the fact that most large external Firewire drives from the likes of Lacie also have massive caches will result in a very nice performance.

Of course the downside for anyone who wants to do any heavy Video work is that the bandwidth must be shared on the Mini with your Video capture as it only has one Firewire port. (although noone bought a Mini to do heavy video work now did they!)

Amen-Moses

 

[mcsenerd]

Nope, but firewire is a lot faster, even faster than USB2. 400Mbps compared to 380Mbps...

Actually theoretical peak throughput of USB 2.0 is higher than Firewire (480Mbps)...but there's additional overhead with USB so general disk benchmarks will usually show Firewire to be better for disk activity.

 

[dtravis7]

So far due to lack of $$$ at the time I did the upgrade, Kingston Value Ram 512Meg PC3200. It works 100% and is dead stable. Taking it apart was easy but I learned it would be even easier if I would used a more flexable puddy knive. Next time I take it apart I have the perfect tool for the job. I left the HDD stock for now and just got a Firewire case from CompUSA that does both Firewire and USB 2.0. I installed my new 80GB 7200 RPM Seagate with 8Meg Cache. Works like a champ and very fast.

Probably this new month will be upgrading to 1GB ram. The 512 is fine for most people but I run a lot of apps at the same time and do a lot of Photoshop work.

 

[Amen-Moses]

Actually theoretical peak throughput of USB 2.0 is higher than Firewire (480Mbps)...but there's additional overhead with USB so general disk benchmarks will usually show Firewire to be better for disk activity.

Oops, my bad I forgot to carry the 1.

Amen-Moses