How the $300 Mini Hackintosh turned into a $750 beast

9to5 Mac by

I was in New York City for a Samsung event focused on SSDs and gaming on PCs last month. There wasn’t much in the way of new information, but Samsung gave me one of their SATA III 256GB 830 SSDs to try out. These are within a few bytes per second of the fastest SATA3 SSDs money can buy, so I was pretty excited to get home and throw it in a Mac.

The problem is that I don’t have a worthy Mac to test it out on. I’ve been using an Air as my exclusive machine for a year and my wife is tired of me testing stuff on her MacBook Pro. We have a bunch of old Macs laying around the house but nothing with a SATA III connection.

Luckily, I’ve been in the market for a new Mac desktop since I replaced my MacBook Pro with an Air last year, but to my surprise, I haven’t really found myself in need of one. The Air drives my 30-inch display pretty well and most of my media has been offloaded to a Gigabit NAS. Since I already have a 30-inch display, an iMac doesn’t really appeal to me. Apple’s headless desktops don’t make sense in my situation either. A Mac Mini isn’t going to be much faster than my Air and the Mac Pro hasn’t been updated in over a year and doesn’t even have SATA 3 on board.

I also have some USB3 and eSATA peripherals that I get for testing and can’t use these products on standard Mac hardware.

I decided to give into temptation and build a Hackintosh… read more...