Need an easy way to add USB3.0 to Mid-2011 MacMini

OK. Sorry I thought youwanted to install USB ports in your 2011. In order to have a MacMini with USB 3.0 installed you need a 2012, the USB ports are part of the Logic Board of ALL minis. There may be a hub that provides USB 3.0 from a FireWire feed but it wouldn't be as fast. There is a Belkin hub in the works for ThunderBolt to USB 3.o, e-sata, FireWire 800, but no market release date yet.

It's a hub that you can put a hard drive into. And there are tons of other hubs that don't have space for a hard drive and are less expensive. I'm sure you can find them.

You're playing semantic games now, and I'm no longer interested. Buh-bye.

The simple answer:

"There is no way that is both easy and inexpensive to add USB 3 to your Mac Mini that did not come with USB 3 built-in."

There are ways to do it using a Thunderbolt to PCIe adapter, and then get a USB 3 PCI3 card. But that would be a very expensive solution.

There are some hubs, some available now and others in the pipeline, that will do the job. But while not as expensive as a Thunderbolt to PCI3 adapter, they're not cheap.

I haven't seen a single relatively inexpensive Thunderbolt to USB 3 adapter on the market, but it's possible they exist and I missed them.

There are FireWire 800 to USB 3 adapters, and they're not terribly expensive. But you will be limited to FireWire 800 speeds (plenty good enough if you ask me, and much better than USB 2).

I'm still partial to FireWire 800 over USB 3, because USB still requires more attention from the CPU. For now, I'm buying storage devices that have both interfaces.

Google can be your friend here, but if you insist that I do it...

Thunderbolt to PCIe

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/HELIOSTB1/

PCIe USB Card

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/CalDigit/FASTA6GU3/

"Some Hubs" – well, only one below but there are a lot more

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack

FireWire 800 to USB 3 Adapter

OK, you caught me here. I couldn't find anything that I was confident would work and cost under $30 and didn't belong to the "some hubs" category. Pretty sure I've seen these, though of course my memory could be faulty or what I might have seen were cables designed to allow powering of external devices only without carrying data.

Plug and pray! Plug in the Thunderbolt to PCIe bus, plug the PCI3 USB card into the PCIe bus. Then pray it works!

I'm just spit-balling here, Allan. I haven't tried any of these things myself. My original point stands: There is currently no easy and inexpensive way to do what the OP wants to do. I suppose that if I were desperate and needed to do this myself, I'd get the MiniStack.

Yes, of course. That's the entire point of using the Thunderbolt to PCIe expansion bus. It adds an external PCIe bus via the Mini's Thunderbolt connection.

(Technically, the Mini does have a PCIe bus, just no external ports for it other than the Thunderbolt port.)

Allan, I don't think you're getting the technical hardware underpinnings here. And I won't claim to be an engineer that understands it intimately myself. But the Mini does have what amounts to internal PCIe, otherwise its Thunderbolt wouldn't be able to carry any data. The Thunderbolt port is part of the PCIe bus. Yes, if you go to System Report on a Mini it will tell you that you have no PCIe cards. But that's misleading.

In the review I read on that earlier today it stated that the Thunderbolt was output. In order to get the PCIe expansion enclosure operational it has to be connected to an operational PCIe bus in the computer.

Allan

Thunderbolt is what one may consider a physical layer,

that is hardware. What is carried on Thunderbolt would

be considered a transport layer.

The transport layer on Thunderbolt consists of two

protocols. Display Port protocol is one which supports

direct video interface. The other is a 2 channel PCI

Express protocol.

On the Mini (2011 or newer), if one is running Windows 7

via Bootcamp, the Thunderbolt Port appears as an extension

of the internal PCI Express bus. Any card adapter (of which there

are a couple available) will basically route these signals into

a card edge connector in the box any card plugged in will

appear in the Windows environment.

With OSX however, it has an additional layer of complexity

to the Thunderbolt interface by requiring that a driver be

"Thunderbolt Aware".

The one idea of the Thunderbolt standard is to make available

an external expasion bus that can be as flexible as possible

which was one of the reasons for the PCI Express protocol.

The USB 3.0 ports are part of the Logic Board. Go ThunderBolt or FireWire if your drives have the ports.

I have been searching for a release date on that also and so far I haven't been able to come with anything yet either.

Allan