Thanks to Mac Mini Hacking, I can pretty much say with confidence that:
- It is possible to replace the hard drive on the Mac Mini yourself, provided you have a good thin putty knife, screwdriver, and nerves of steel (see “It takes a very steady hand” for the link to the video).
- As the hard drive used in the Mini is a 2.5″ laptop drive, there may not be much point. The biggest replacement drive available (as far as I know) is 100 GB. For reference, my laptop hard drive currently has 35 GB of digital music on it, some ripped and some downloaded from the iTunes store. I have probably over 600 more CDs to rip, but there’s simply no room on my hard drive. And let’s not even talk about video at that size—you could only get 90 minutes of HD content on there.
So it looks like if you’re serious about doing home theater with your Mac Mini, you’ll either have to wait until laptop hard drives come in bigger sizes, or live with a stack of outboard drives attached to your Mini.