
- #Mac mini late 2012 hard drive upgrade for free
- #Mac mini late 2012 hard drive upgrade pro
- #Mac mini late 2012 hard drive upgrade mac
Apparently some hard drives will cause the fan inside to go to highest speed. Although this brand/type works fine for me I'm sure there are others that are comparable in most ways, check local availability and prices. I did not want to put smaller capacity SSD into the iMac and higher capacity SSDs were much more expensive. I purchased 500 GB Samsung SSD 850 Evo because it was decent capacity at comparatively low price in my area.

You'll love your Mini all over again.For this step you need to gather some parts.Ī SSD. The additional bonus, in a sense, is that you'd have each drive on two different buses in the Mini. I prefer the 8TB units since they have WD Red or White NAS drives installed and they're always on sale BB charges less for these units than the bare drives cost even from Newegg, Fry's, etc. My opinion for you is to consider swapping out the spinner for a decent-sized SSD from Samsung such as a 850/860 EVO and - since you've indicated a want for extra storage - put that money you planned on spending on the data doubler kit and get a 4TB or 8TB WD easystore DAS unit. I put my iTunes library on the HHD, along with archived photos that get moved from the SSD. I was going to do the drive swap anyway but noticed that the stock spinners were operating at SATA 2 speeds, the remaining drive still does - even though they're rated at SATA 3.
#Mac mini late 2012 hard drive upgrade pro
You could use your internal hard drive for SSD automatic backups with either time machine or Carbon Copy Cloner.Ģ012 i7 Mini Server owner here, I swapped out one of the two 1TB spinners with a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro and left the other drive in place the HD that I removed was wiped and stashed away. I use external hard drives for archival storage of other data. I prefer having a large SSD that has room for all the files I regularly work with. Reboot and you're all set - it will be exactly the same as before. After the clone is ready, select the external SSD in the Startup Disk pane in System Preferences. Personally, I would want at least one additional clone of the original on another hard drive, just for safety in case something goes wrong. Format the external disk for MacOS and then use Carbon Copy to create a bootable clone of the internal drive with a recovery partition.
#Mac mini late 2012 hard drive upgrade for free
Get Carbon Copy Cloner - I think you can use it for free for a month which is plenty of time for your needs (although I suggest you purchase it anyway, I use it regularly on all my Macs). A cheap external may be slower than the T3 in my example however. loading a large file from the internal hard drive will take about 4x longer than a fast external USB SSD.

But the stock drives on a new Mini clock around 100MB/sec when new - this may degrade with age. I don't use the Photos app so I can't really say what the bottleneck is. I've been booting and running my own 2012 i7 Mini this way for going on six years now, from the day I first took it out of the box.
#Mac mini late 2012 hard drive upgrade mac
When that time comes, having an external drive makes it easy to just unplug the drive from the Mini, and plug it into your new Mac for additional fast storage. I'd suggest either a Samsung t3 or t5, or something like this:Įventually, you're going to move on to another Mac. You'll get about 80-85% of the speed you would see from an internally-installed SATA SSD, but without any of the trouble you might run into doing the installation. You should see reads in the 420+mbps range and writes 300-350mbps (depending on drive and size). Speeds will jump up to about 4-4.5x those of the internal drive.

Put the OS, apps, and basic accounts on it. Set it up to become "the external boot drive". Fastest, easiest way - without prying open the Mini - buy an external USB3 SSD drive, and plug it in.
