When my hardware at work was upgraded from a Late 2012 Mac mini (single HD) to a Late 2014 Mac mini with a Fusion drive, I noticed a significant performance upgrade. Limited Quantity, Only 18 LeftI've been using my Mac mini Server (Late 2012) for some time now in a RAID 0 configuration (2 internal 1 TB hard drives, showing up in the Finder as a single 2 TB volume). Tested A-OK, 30 Day OWC Fulfilled Limited Warranty. Replacing the hard drive or hard drives is a more complicated procedure and Apple does not support users performing this upgrade themselves.() 1.0TB Apple Genuine 2.5-inch SATA 5400RPM Hard Drive from MacBook, MacBook Pro or Mac mini. To upgrade the memory in the Aluminum 'Unibody' Mac mini models released before and after the Late 2014 models, Apple has made it straightforward. Hard Drive Upgrade Official Disclaimer & Cautions.Now that you have a Time Machine Backup on a separate external drive, you can safely remove the current Hard Disk on your Mac and replace it with a New SSD Drive. Replace Existing Hard Drive on Mac with SSD Drive. What You NeedBecause of its sealed enclosure, it is not possible to upgrade the hard drive without opening the enclosure and possibly voiding the warranty of the system. This article documents the most effective way I found to do so and the resources I used, providing additional details along the way that would have been helpful to me. I knew I could create a Fusion Drive on my Mac mini so long as there was one internal SSD and one hard drive, so I decided to do that to improve my performance. 4 processor cores), I attributed the performance bump to the presence of an internal SSD.The Apple Mac mini 'Core i5' 2.5 (Late 2012/Aluminum Unibody) features a 22-nm 'Ivy Bridge' 2.5 GHz Intel 'Core i5' (3210M) processor with two independent processor 'cores' on a single chip, a 3 MB shared level 3 cache, 4 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 SDRAM (PC3-12800) memory, a 500 GB hard drive, and Intel HD Graphics 4000 which shares system memory.Since I was taking up less than 700 GB of space on the internal drives of my Mac at home, I could afford to remove one of the two 1 TB hard drives, at least with regards to the amount of storage I needed.
Torx T6, Torx T8, and 2.0 mm Hex screwdrivers (I had a 15-piece set from The Source that is no longer available, but you could choose the NewerTech 11-piece set, which also has a pry tool that could be handy) 2.5" SATA Solid State Drive (I chose a 250 GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO) An external bootable disk/volume with Disk Utility and Terminal included (you may want a macOS Recovery partition as well) External storage for backups with at least the capacity of your two internal drives (in my case, I needed at least 2 TB) 15 -June 15 delivery Will buy any Model 135 (FE-H or IBM MAC or TLP Natl. A Mac mini (2011 or 2012) with two internal hard drives configured as a RAID (it's certainly possible to upgrade your single drive Mac mini to a Fusion Drive, but it requires an extra drive mounting kit and many more steps, so it will not be discussed here)94111 ITEL f 3 - 230 Disk Storage Units, total of 6 spindles Call or write: '. Add a macOS Recovery Partition (optional) Create (or Retrieve) an External Boot Drive/Volume Optional: AutoDMG, the Open Source software tool from Per Olafsson that modularly creates a bootable macOS volume in a disk image, suitable for block-coping Optional: A current macOS Installer (e.g., Install macOS Sierra) Optional: External 2.5" drive enclosure (so that you can repurpose the hard drive that gets removed I chose a Vantec NexStar 6G USB 3.0 enclosure with which I have had good success at work). Best Hard Drive Mini 2012 Full Backup OfFrom the Time Machine menu extra (or from System Preferences > Time Machine), select Backup Now and wait until the backup completes. I made certain both of those were current. I also periodically make a full backup of my boot drive using Disk Utility, which I then store off site. Redundantly.I use Time Machine for my day-to-day backup using a Time Capsule on our home network. Repurpose the Leftover Hard Drive (optional)Step 1: Backup all the things. ![]() If so, and you don't care if your new setup has a local Recovery Partition installed (since you've been operating without one anyway), you can skip ahead to Step 3.Otherwise, I'd recommend you do one of two things: Perhaps you even have a bootable external hard drive or SSD with a full version of an OS that your Mac mini can run (in this case, OS X 10.8.1 or later ). Step 2: Create (or Retrieve) an External Boot Drive/VolumeIf you own a tool like TechTool Pro or you use DeployStudio, you may already have a bootable USB Drive that has Disk Utility and Terminal on it. Step 3: Perform Mac mini SurgerySwapping in the new SSD for the old hard drive is slightly tricky, but I found it to be manageable — and this is from someone who is more software-oriented than hardware-oriented. For now, since I presume readers of this blog can install an OS on a blank volume, I will not elaborate further. It's probably worth a separate blog post to describe this. It also gives you a base for creating a quickie external boot drive. Use AutoDMG and a current OS installer to create a disk image that you then copy to an empty volume of an external drive using Disk Utility (again, 30 GB or larger is best, although you can get away with less).The AutoDMG method is the more robust one, because the disk image will include a Recovery Partition — that comes in handy in Step 5 should you choose to do that optional step. In the end, I finally got it aligned with the help of a small screwdriver (which also held back the flap). Take some time when disassembling to see the position you will need to replicate. Reconnecting the WiFi connector is a lot harder than it looks, especially if your Mac mini has that flap in the way. If you'd prefer a list of steps in text, iFixIt also has a guide.A couple of notes from my experience doing the swap: Use the instructions for the single drive model because you will only be replacing the first (and easiest) drive, and as such should not need to do special handstands like removing the logic board (as is necessary if you are replacing both drives). I ended up flipping the Mac mini to its normal upright position so that gravity would cause the SSD to rest on the grate. In my case, there was enough play there that it would not catch reliably. When you screw in the two Torx 8 screws into the grate holding the WiFi hardware (about 6 minutes in to the OWC video), the screws are meant to be received by the drive you just installed. My replacement SSD was much thinner than the hard drive it replaced. (My earlier attempts were always at an angle slightly off vertical and would not connect.) Since I knew I was going to erase it in a minute, I responded by clicking the Ignore button in the dialogue box.Here's what the drive setup looked like in Disk Utility (10.10 version) before we created the Fusion Drive:And here's the view from terminal: $ diskutil list2: Apple_HFS Storage Space 450.0 GB disk2s23: Apple_HFS YosemiteBoot 49.1 GB disk2s34: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk2s4So using the above information, I created a Fusion Drive from Terminal (using an Admin account). (I guess you could use Internet Recovery if absolutely necessary, since it does give you access to Terminal.) Once I was booted, I got notified of the blank disk, with the GUI requesting whether I wanted to format it or not. I had a OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) boot drive handy, so I chose that. The data from the original RAID will be destroyed.The Mac mini needs to be booted from an external drive. Best digital music player for macYou can also name the grouping of the two drives whatever you like (I chose Fusion1TB). Besides, the SSD was completely blank, so the diskutil command does the right thing by default on that disk: format it using a GUID Partition Table and add an HFS+ Journaled volume.So based on the information from diskutil list (above), I used this command to create the new Fusion drive:Sudo diskutil cs create Fusion1TB disk0 disk1Note: cs stands for CoreStorage you may use the form diskutil coreStorage … if you prefer.
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