Ok, I got my 8GB of RAM and a 60 GB SSD in the mail on Saturday, and I got really excited to install them. It took me a while to figure out how to clone the contents of my HDD to an external drive and how I would go about booting from the external drive in order to formate the SDD and such. Then I used a Youtube tutorial to instruct me how to open the Mac Mini and perform the physical tasks of swapping the drives.
It was more intricate than I had counted on, and I don't have the best DIY track record. Bad move... I slid the control board too abruptly at a key point and had failed to disconnect all the wires I needed to disconnect. Effect....? The optical disc drive connector completely tore off the control board
There's just no way to solder that puppy back on there at all. I was really pissed and worried at that point, having no idea if I'd just toasted the entire Mac Mini or not. It turns out it just disconnected the DVD drive - so now I don't have use of the drive at all. But the rest of the computer works fine, and I'm happy to say the new SSD and RAM is definitely providing a good performance boost.
Ok, now to my question. Is it possible that a non-functional DVD drive would have some audio performance benefits? Could it help improve sound quality? If so, I wouldn't recommend ripping the socket off of the control board, but it would be quite easy to simply disconnect it the way it was meant to be during the hard drive swap and simply not reconnect it - for those who don't need their optical drive to work. In fact, I'm probably gonna buy an external USB DVD drive and only hook it up when it's needed.
I was just thinking this might be one of those cases where a mistake leads one to a road not taken and some possible benefit from my fat fingers!
