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PHoynak · Dec 4, 2007, 03:34 PM

I may want to upgrade my Mac Mini's hard drive. I have the Intel Core Solo 1.5 GHZ with the 60 GB hard drive. I currently boot off a Newer Tech external drive. What kind of laptop drive to I need exactly to install. Also what is the best way to clone my old drive to the new one before installing it or is there a better way to transfer my data over?

Cave Man · Dec 4, 2007, 04:02 PM

Any 2.5" SATA ought to work. I have a Seagate in mine.

Carbon Copy Cloner works very well.

PHoynak · Dec 4, 2007, 05:41 PM

Does it matter if I get a 7200 Rpm Drive? Any heat issues?

mduell · Dec 4, 2007, 06:00 PM

7200RPM is fine (and faster!), no heat issues. Any SATA laptop hard drive will do.

The easiest way to clone your data is to throw one of the drives in a $15 USB enclosure and run carboncopycloner or superduper (or dd if you like the command line... but if you did you would probably already know that).

Cave Man · Dec 4, 2007, 08:09 PM

Originally Posted by PHoynak

. Also what is the best way to clone my old drive to the new one before installing it or is there a better way to transfer my data over?

If you have enough available space on your external drive, you can use CCC to create a disk image of your internal drive. Then, just install your new internal drive and have CCC copy the disk image to the new drive as a bootable disk.