Undoing two Philips screws on the backplate allows you to slide out the innards. If you can use a screwdriver, your skill-set is complete. Installing drives into the enclosure is trivial even for non-technical types, thanks to the extremely comprehensive instruction booklet with clear, step-by-step photos. This is an external enclosure for two 2.5-inch drives, which supports both USB 3 and Firewire 800, drawing power from either source – making it a portable drive without the need for external power …

I could have placed each into its own external drive caddy, but one 2TB drive is more useful than two 1TB ones, so I decided instead to try out OWC’s Mercury Elite Pro mini. When that finally happened, and I did the upgrade, that gave me two 1TB hard drives surplus to requirements. Along with a RAM upgrade, that gave me a 16GB RAM, 2TB hard drive machine. The plan was to use the machine in that form for a year or two, then do a further upgrade to SSDs once 1TB models arrived and fell to a halfway sensible price. I’d previously swapped out the 750GB hard drive and optical drive that came with my late-2011 MacBook Pro 17 for two 1TB hard drives. This is especially true of the pre-Retina MacBook Pro models, where it’s trivial to upgrade both the RAM and the drive. One of the reasons I like Macs is that their useful life tends to be significantly longer than that of a typical Windows machine.

Power supply for mac mini 2014