Last week I wrote about upgrading a Mac Pro tower with a Solid State Drive or SSD plugged into a Peripheral Component Interconnect express card which I placed into one of the PCIe slots within the Pro’s enormous aluminum chassis. It may sound daunting, but it was really straightforward. The installation may have taken 5 minutes.
Disassembling and upgrading the 2009 Mac mini, pictured at the top, was a lot more challenging.
Dan Love in Vietnam
But before I get to the electronic entrails, this story starts as most of my Mac stories do with the late, great Dan Love.
Dan was my computer guru generously sharing his time, his considerable expertise and his castoff Macs. It was Dan who threw me my first Other World Computing catalog pointing out the possibilities of installing a processor upgrade into a Mac past its prime and turning it into a hot rod. Without Dan, I wouldn’t have had three-quarters of the computers I have used.
Without Dan, I certainly wouldn’t have had the courage to attack these seemingly precious electronics with a toolkit.
The world is a colder, darker place without him.
Back around Christmas of 2015, a relative of Dan’s was upgrading to a newer computer. The relative had a well-used 2009 Mac mini which he chucked at Dan. Dan didn’t want it so he offered it to me. I figured I would find a use for it. A mini wouldn’t take up much room.
Around New Years 2016, I popped open the mini with a putty knife which is not for the faint of heart and removed the slot loading optical drive that read CD’s and DVD’s and replaced it with a Data Doubler which is the blue frame pictured below. That frame takes a secondary hard drive which is more useful than the crappy optical drive that came standard with that particular Mac. I’ve had those type of disk readers fail more than once on me, and I was always terrified that a valuable piece of software or a movie was going to get stuck in it never to be retrieved. I have external, tray loading optical drives that are a lot more reliable that I can connect via USB. Having an extra hard drive trumped the utility of a slot loading optical drive. The optical drive had to go.
I think I increased the RAM to the maximum while I had it open. I modernized it as much as I could.
Tina used this on her photography and artwork until she upgraded to a new mini on Christmas 2022. So she got six years out of it and put it to considerable use.
The 2009 went away in storage. It would be there in case it was needed, but I doubted that the need would ever arise.
Then, years later, I got a notion.
The Mac Pro was a 2009 model as was the mini. What would happen if I took the SSD I just used to upgrade the Pro and tried to boot the mini? Would it work? Would the Adobe CS4 suite I had on that solid state drive launch?
SATA to USB adapter
I got out a SATA to USB adapter so I wouldn’t have to tear apart the computer and fired it up. Pressed the power button, held down the option key on the keyboard and selected the external drive.
It booted which I expected it would.
I tried the Adobe programs.
They worked! I thought there would be some activation nonsense tied to the Mac’s serial number, but it worked as well as it did on the Mac Pro. Ultimately, the mini doesn’t have the horsepower of the Pro, but I have access to boxed software that has been bought and paid for years ago!
Back to the operating room…
2009 Mac mini with the lid off and split in two
I opened up the 2009 Mac mini and replaced a failing mechanical drive with a brand new Solid State Drive that contained a clone of the system and software that is on the Mac Pro. This is a lot harder than upgrading the Pro, and it took me two passes before I got it just right.
I won’t bore you with the details of this Mac’s evisceration, but the guide I used can be found here. There’s also a video I had to refer to as far as removing and reinstalling the Data Doubler which can be found here.
The Mini is all together now and working well. It boots almost immediately with the SSD. I played around with the CS4 suite and enjoyed the familiarity of those old but completely viable programs. They still have the Pantone library and they still work with Postscript fonts. I feel like I am gaining more from moving back than whatever is being offered currently by Adobe.
As Colin Clive said:
So I am now this much closer to cancelling Adobe’s subscription program.
Stay tuned — there’s more to come!
