Mac mini inside Cube

[MacFever]

Hi guys,

After reading several mods on Cube's I was wondering if putting a i5 Mac Mini inside a Cube would be possible
I think I will give it a try ...
This way I would have the fabulous Cube look with a modern Mac inside, I think that there is maybe even a possibility to put a second hard drive inside the Cube casing (SSD inside the Mac Mini and a 2Tb next to it)
What do you guys think ?

Has this been done already ?

Eric

 

[minihack]

Hi guys,

After reading several mods on Cube's I was wondering if putting a i5 Mac Mini inside a Cube would be possible
I think I will give it a try ...
This way I would have the fabulous Cube look with a modern Mac inside, I think that there is maybe even a possibility to put a second hard drive inside the Cube casing (SSD inside the Mac Mini and a 2Tb next to it)
What do you guys think ?

Has this been done already ?

Eric

Eric, I think there should be plenty of room......you can apparently just squeeze an ITX board in the new Mini case and as you can also similarly squeeze an ITX in the Cube I am pretty sure the Mac Mini board will fit in the Cube. Critical dimanesions are around 170mm by 170mm to fit.

Back in the day I put one of the old style minis in my Cube case. That also had a 3.5" SATA drive, a slot loading DVD drive and at one point a 3.5" IDE drive in there too for good measure.

 

[MacFever]

Thanks for the info !
Did you put the complete mini inside the cube or did you remove the casing ?

 

[minihack]

On my old Mac mini I removed the top case, cut down the bottom case slightly, converted the old IDE interface in there to take two drives, and relocated then all the drives etc. into the body of the Cube. As I didn't want to overload the onboard power I added a picopsu in there (taking mains power from the original Mac Mini power brick) to drive the two 3.5" HDDs....

Just been looking on the web and found this pic of the latest 2012 mini internals:

The outside case is 19cm square, but the internal board as you see is smaller if you strip it down. It may have to go in at a slight angle into the cube.

 

[MacFever]

I think that the latest Mac Mini powersupply can handle a SSD and a normal harddisk since it can come with a fusion drive (120 SSD and 1 Tb harddisk)

 

[minihack]

You are probably right. One thing I found in my old build was there was nowhere on the circuit board to get 12v from. You will have to dig around with a volt meter to see if there is a suitable place to tap into that for a 3.5" drive. These days though.....is there really a need for a full size HDD?

 

[MacFever]

I think there must be a second sata controller or a possibility to split since the case can accept 2 drives

 

[minihack]

But my point is that the drives in there will be 2.5" drives which only need 5volts. So I am just saying that powering a 3.5" drive (which works off 12v) may be problematic.....

 

[MacFever]

I found the solution :

http://www.ifixit.com/Apple-Parts/M...t&utm_term=if171-005&utm_content=product_link

 

[MacFever]

but you are right, it is only for 2,5 drives ...
I want to put a 2 Tb Caviar Green (silent!) inside for video's and music