Would it be possible to remove the internal hard drive altogether, attach cables to the hard drive interconnect board and run them out the bottom of the mini to an external 3.5 inch 1TB SATA drive? Do you know of a cable adapter that would plug into the hard drive interconnect board? It looks like a different size than your optical drive cable adapter. I'd like to keep my optical drive but attach a 3.5 inch SATA drive externally.