i just had an idea. I saw a pic of a guy who had stuck a mini ITX board into an old powermac G4 case. i think that it would be grand to do the same thing with a mac mini. As far as I can tell the mini logic board is about the same size or smaller. The case would provide room for the mini to take advantage of faster 3.5" IDE drives, and it would also make upgrading a snap. I know that to connect a 3.5" IDE drive requires an adaptor, and ive already found one. My problem is the optical drive. I would love to use the original cube drive for authenticity, but i wonder if it can be connected to a mini's logic board. Maybe some sort of adapter? i dont know, but anyway, comments and suggestions welcomed.

Do you mean the Cube G4 case or the Powermac Tower case?

Make sure you are not looking at the common 2.5" to 3.5" converter, because it's going to be backwards. The Purple Mac mini mod has some information on the converter:



http://www.macmod.com/content/view/273/


The optical drive uses a standard laptop optical interface, similar to what the iMac's used for the slot/tray load drives.

I uploaded the second image in the previous post just now, first try. Figured it was a great demo to people that the image uploads work great again! That is why I just didn't edit it and add the following note. - whitlock

You can use the Cube's optical drive since it's just a standard laptop interface. I'd actually use the mini's optical drive since it's a lot better than what you would have in there now.

my idea was to just buy a mac mini logic board and power supply. I wasnt going to have a mini optical drive to work with in the first place anyway. Well, it looks like i'll just use a laptop harddrive. There is a mounting bracket i saw over at cubeowner.com that allows a 2.5" drive to be mounted so il pick me up one of those.

oh whoops..guess i forgot to say i meant the powermac G4 cube...hm.

Keep us updated, and if you have any other questions feel free to ask!

(don't forget the mod guide too!)

The cube case is one of Apple's nicest designs. This is a great idea. You may find that you need more than just theMini Motherboard though. The ATA bus is run by a daughtercard as is the Airport. The Airport you'll have to decide how bad you want it vrs how much it will cost. You can allways use an external solution for wireless. The ATA bus is a tougher nut to crack. If you can find and buy the daughtercard your good to go, otherwise you'll need to use a different bus, like the firewire bus with a bridge board stolen from an external 2.5" drive enclosure.

Here is the ATA Daughtercard:

http://www.mac-pro.com/s.nl/sc.2/category.333/it.A/id.2270/.f



Post edited by: mordaskyt, at: 2006/01/26 03:25

you know there is enough room in the inner case of the shell... i bet you could fit Two Mac Minis inside of it. i'm sure you can fit at least one in the cage with som modding and bracket removal
dang if i had the 600 to drop for a mini, and about 100 for the cube case i'd ba all over that one


macDeviant

well, i wont need airport, so that wont be an issue. when this project is finished it will sit less that two feet from my router, so wireless would be rather pointless. I am now thinking that it would be better to buy the cube case and a mac mini on ebay. This would have everything, obviously, so the various daughtercards wouldnt be an issue.