Despite my plan of waiting until later this year, I spent about an hour this afternoon upgrading the internal hard disk of my Mac mini to a 1TB hybrid drive that I bought in an upgrade kit from iFixit. The process went about as smoothly as one could expect and I’m currently running Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of the old drive to the new one.

A couple quick tips that took some trial and error to figure out, in case you end up performing this in the future:

• The Logic Board Removal Tool is absolutely essential to this upgrade — the cheaper, non-Apple one works fine. I had some trouble sliding the board out until I realized that the removal tool is meant to be used like a lever where the pivot point is located beyond the board, against the inside of the mini’s casing.
• The most difficult part was getting the new drive to positioned so that the screws fit inside of the rubber grommets in the front side of the mini’s casing. The key is to be patient and use gravity to your advantage — I found sitting the mini on its front, so that its oriented vertically, to be the easiest way to seat it properly.

With any luck, the new drive will be fully operational by tomorrow.