{"id":46968,"date":"2026-01-27T10:06:50","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T15:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/willceau.com\/news\/?p=46968"},"modified":"2026-02-15T08:51:25","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T13:51:25","slug":"party-like-its-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/willceau.com\/news\/2026\/01\/27\/party-like-its-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Party Like It’s 2009!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nLast week I wrote about upgrading a Mac Pro tower with a Solid State Drive<\/em> or SSD <\/em>plugged into a Peripheral Component Interconnect express<\/em> card which I placed into one of the PCIe<\/em> slots within the Pro’s enormous aluminum chassis. It may sound daunting, but it was really straightforward. The installation may have taken 5 minutes.<\/p>\n

Disassembling and upgrading the 2009 Mac mini<\/em>, pictured at the top, was a lot more challenging.<\/p>\n

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Dan Love in Vietnam<\/p><\/div>\n

But before I get to the electronic entrails, this story starts as most of my Mac stories do with the late, great Dan Love<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Without Dan, I certainly wouldn’t have had the courage to attack these seemingly precious electronics with a toolkit.<\/p>\n

The world is a colder, darker place without him.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"Dirty<\/a>