'09 mac mini hardware upgrade advice Hello all I have an early '09 Mac mini 3,1 (Intel Core 2 duo 2GHz, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD) which I need to upgrade soon as it is slowly dying (i.e., runnning an IDE like netbeans while having chrome open is becoming overkill for the poor thing).

I am looking at maxing out the RAM to 8GB (from my research I believe this is feasible) and replacing the HDD with a 60GB SSD as I do not really store much (if any) media. Monetarily, I have worked the cost to be around £100 which is not too bad?

I would appreciate your feedback on the following especially if you have done this or similar


ease of replacing the RAM
ease of replacing the HDD
whether 8gb does indeed work (well)
whether SSDs do work as well as benchmarks and hype suggest (in this context)
any problems that can be incurred by doing this (I'm not to concerned re. void waranties more breaking hardware)
anything I need to take in to consideration that I possibly am not


The hardware I am looking at getting is Corsair CMSA8GX3M2A1066C7 and Crucial CT064M4 though I may go for the slightly cheaper Vertex 2, any comments on these choices would be much appreciated also.

If anyone from the UK has had experience with getting a second HDD 'dock' to replace the optical drive with a second HDD/SSD then any infromation surrounding this (both obtaining and installing - though the latter I guess is regionally unspecific) would also be very helpful.
The 2009 and earlier model Mac Mini all lack the black small round access port, so are much easier to get at the hard drive than the newer thin "unibody" Mac Mini computers.

I really like RamJet for checking which machines can run more ram than Apple places in their "what we support at the time the hardware is released" manuals. They only sell to Macs, so really have to work hard to mix up your models or get the wrong ram. Where you buy is certainly up for debate, but the RamJet tools are the nicest I've seen.

As to your hard drive exchange - the SSD will replace the HDD easily. Putting a second drive will be less easy as I'm not aware of a mounting kit for the optical drive attachment in that class of Mac Mini. Do your homework well or get a good return policy if you find out your drive doesn't work when connected to the optical drive SATA connection.