- 2014 mac mini hard drive replacement upgrade#
- 2014 mac mini hard drive replacement full#
- 2014 mac mini hard drive replacement mac#
2014 mac mini hard drive replacement mac#
Internal SSD replacement for the 2010 to 2014 "unibody" Mac mini requires considerably more effort and skill than doing so for the MacBooks and iMacs. You see, it was slow and hampered by its components, and in desperate need. Here's what you need to know, along with our top-rated Apple-friendly drives. Rotate the bottom cover counter-clockwise until the white dot painted on the bottom cover is aligned with the ring inscribed on the outer case. Attach the enclosure or cable-connected SSD to the Mac mini, via USB.
2014 mac mini hard drive replacement upgrade#
Unlike previous models, you cannot upgrade the internal hard drive.
2014 mac mini hard drive replacement full#
Upgrade Hard Drive in Mac Mini Our workshop offers a full range of professional iMac repairs & iMac upgrades, including iMac SSD upgrade, iMac RAM upgrade, iMac hard drive replacement, iMac graphics card replacement, iMac screen replacement, iMac power supply replacement, iMac logic board repair, and Mac hard. If your Mac mini only has a hard drive, skip the steps about the PCIe SSD and its connector. The 2014 Mac mini (starting at $499) is an attractive, affordable and efficient OS X machine.
The 8GB memory has been expanded to 16GB, and the 256GB hard drive has been expanded to 1TB. We offer all sorts of upgrades that will really make an older Mac mini powerful again. Some Mac models hard drives aren't replaceable by end users. It's not a terrible job, but if you screw up and break the screen you are not going to replace it for less than the entire machine is worth.6. I'd rather tear apart a mini to replace something that have to use a small plastic pizza wheel to cut through the adhesive on the edge of the iMac screen and then pull it off with suction cups to get inside. I am thinking about moving to an M1 Mac Mini and getting a separate thunderbolt monitor when I upgrade. After two spinning drives failed within a short time of each other (the other the 3TB disk in my Time Capsule) I am only going to use SSD's from now on. Apple's Fusion drive for this model year is just the PCie and SATA merged logically by the OS.
The dead SATA drive is a bit easier to replace, after removing the screen. The 128GB PCIe board still works but is buried inside and requires almost complete disassembly. I may get around the tearing the thing open and replacing the internal drives. Speed is fine, and I added a couple 16 GB sticks from OWC a while ago for a total of 40 GB (left the two original 4GB sticks in there) It's not really needed but if I'm buying memory sticks I always get the biggest that will work in the machine. They are the fastest available USB-C, but not Thunderbolt. The internal fusion drive on my 2017 iMac 27 died so I am running on two external 2 TB SSD's. Longest part was restoring from Time Machine Backup. No more spinning balls, no more browser crashes, no more apps crashing, boot up time is less than a minute. Ultimately it was less than 15 minutes start to finish on the first one and I think I did the second one in under 5 minutes. I bought both the tool kit and SSD drives from OWC. Lots of the vids seem to only show how easy it is, and it is, but there are a couple places you can pull a ribbon plug wrong and screw things up. I watched several different videos looking for ones where people made mistakes so i could see what not to do. And that is exactly what I ended up doing on both. I couldn't find real answers to if that made a difference, but I did watch a lot of youtube vids about replacing internally. My research on replacement was that using them externally would slow the speed to whatever the connecting cable speed was limited to. I have two of the exact same 2014 Minis you speak of, one for me & the other for the wife. I thought about doing just what you are asking, using an external SSD drive as the OS hard disk, for exactly the same reason. Have you confirmed that the system is hanging on disk accesses, or constantly swapping? If it is not, then speeding up the disk accesses will do little or nothing to eradicate the beach ball, although other aspects of system performance might get a boost. Would a second drive as the SSD, configured to be the boot drive, with the OS X there, be a good solution for application speed and the spinning beach ball? Maybe, it depends on what the machine is doing that is causing the delay. This is very easy to install, in comparison. They also sell an add-on PCIe SSD, simply a circuit board with a ribbon cable, which affixes to some screws present inside the case.
OWC has a SSD replacement drive, which takes a fair amount of mechanic work to install. For whatever stupid reason, Apple soldered the RAM to the logic board, so I am stuck with 8 GB RAM for this i5 processor. In that OS, the spinning beach ball of death has returned.