[JustAMacUser]

Originally Posted by dbates

Original poster here... the main reason I switched out to the SSD (and what I liked about my mini9) was durability. I just didn't worry as much about my mini when an SSD drive was installed. I could toss the machine around and treat it a little more cavalierly...

Yeah... I miss that about my Mini 9. But I treat my Mini 10v with almost the same level of ruggedness (which for me isn't saying much since I'm pretty careful). I don't really keep any information on my 10v that isn't also on my primary computer so I don't have a whole lot of fear about losing stuff.

Although my hard drive is noisy. And I do miss the instant-on speed of the SSD in my Mini 9. Maybe I'll make the switch someday when prices of SSDs come down a bit.

[g33k247]

Did you have any problems with Windows 7 recognizing your SSD?

Originally Posted by dbates

I thought I'd post this in case someone else can benefit from my boneheadness :-)

I bought a 10V, after previously owning a mini 9, and wanted to duplicate my great SSD experience. So I bought a 32 GB SSD drive, namely the OCZ vertex series 30 GB drive from buy.com through Amazon to replace the hard drive in the 10v.

I wanted to get some help on installing the drive (looking at the memory installation procedure made my heart stop momentarily). I found a video walk-through on youtube of a guy replacing the hard drive on his mini 10. Seemed close enough.

And everything worked okay, except for one miscue. The hard drive in the 10v sits inside a small metal cage that attaches to the computer body with a single screw. The guy on the video tutorial said that the SSD drive wouldn't fit inside this cage, and not to bother using it for the SSD installation. He felt that the tight fit of the connectors was enough to keep the SSD drive attached.

Well, I installed the drive, and got it to work, but after a few days I was getting the dreaded:

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.
Operating System not found

which essentially means that the drive isn't attached to the computer. Sure enough, when I shook my netbook, I could hear the drive rattling around in there! It turns out that there wasn't enough friction alone to keep the drive attached properly.

I went back to the original hard drive and unattached the drive sled. It turns out that the SSD drive would fit inside this sled! I attached the sled to the SSD and attached the sled to the computer with the single screw.

So far, everything's working fine. I doubt I'll have further problems.

And, hopefully this will help anyone who's thinking about replacing their har drive. Use the sled!