Is it possible to use an SSD with a Airport Card PCIe slot in a Mac mini (A1176)?

Question

I have made some modifications to an old Mac mini I picked up. I’ve removed the optical drive and have two 750GB WD drives installed, maxed the RAM and upgraded the CPU to a Core 2 Duo.

Now I’d like to remove the Airport Card from the PCIe slot on the logic board and install an SSD card: Intel Solid-State Drive 310 Series

My questions are:

• Will macOS recognize this drive in the PCIe slot?
• Will it be bootable so I can load the OS?
• What data transfer speed is possible?
• Did Apple use a standard PCIe?

The plan is to load the OS on the SSD and have the two 750’s in a RAID 1 configuration as a media array.

I don’t need Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Will this work?

Answer 1

Looks like it is a standard mini-PCIe slot, though more recent Mac minis don’t have them. I found an article about someone successfully installing a SATA controller in their slot, which certainly sounds positive for your proposal.

Sorry I can’t be more definitive, but there probably aren’t many people doing this! I have a SATA OCZ Vertex 2 in my 2009 Mac mini, and it flies.