Best upgrade guide for this task. Completed this in about 35 minutes, with most of it being me rewinding to make sure I was following correctly. Thanks for making this!!
Great guide, thank you. And what a relatively easy job that was. After years of being scared of getting one of these Mac Minis because of the logic board removal process, I finally picked one up today for cheap, and replaced the HDD with an SDD in no more than 40mins, and my removal tool? A plain old steel clothes hanger, cut to about 6-7 inches and bent into the rough shape of the commercial removal tools. It’s the perfect diameter steel.
Nicely done. Appreciate the time and effort that went into doing this. After seeing it going to make sure I get an SSD that is big enough that I never have to do this a second time.
I was surprised to see the 2014 model needs a different size Torx bit to remove its bottom plate. It seems slightly harder to get into generally, maybe due to lack of upgradable RAM. New M1's unfortunately continue this trend :(
Steve jobs always said he wanted the Apple products to look as beautiful on the inside as the outside. I used to be an IT technician years ago before retraining and this is by far the easiest mini pc to work on I’ve seen. Just moved to Mac mini after spending years building up my Apple collection. Now have the IPad Pro 2021 11 inch, IPhone 13 mini, Apple Watch SE, 1st Gen AirPods, and now my first Mac. There’s just something I’ve always loved about the Mac mini. Never been a fan of the IMac just because they displays are apples own so if they go then you’re into new Mac territory, plus I don’t like working on all in ones. Didn’t want a MacBook as I have the IPad so I got the Mac Mini. Runs great on a HDD but could be so much better on SSD
Thank you for this. I’ve done this already on 2 other Mac mini’s but it’s been a while. It was nice to have some to follow along as I did it to a third machine. Sadly I broke my IR connector but I don’t use that feature anyway. All is running well.
I was unable to do this thing, so got the internal SSD + case option, and it works. So, now I have a hybrid setup - 480 GB crucial SSD to boot MacOS, and 1TB SSD to store the data.
Thanks a lot! Successfully switched drive but struggled to clone my old disk because my SSD was smaller. I tried to shrink the old partition with gparted live usb and then clone with clonezilla live usb but the disk failed to boot. Then I figured out you could actually boot the mac mini into "internet recovery mode" (windowskey+R on windows keyboard) and download MacOS directly, then I used my timemachine backup to recover old disk 100%. Clever Apple!
After I bought the security Torx screw driver, changing to SSD is just an easy job by following your tutorial! Thank you! BTW, I used a piece of AWG14 copper wire (stripped both ends) instead of the special logic-board removal tool.
Great video, so helpful like other have found. I ran into some hiccups reformatting the drive though. But disassembly and reassembly went well and get this.. NO spare parts left over!! Thanks!
I've been told by a large NYC store that I need a 7mm to 9.5mm adapter to fill in the extra space around new SSDs because the Mac mini Late 2014 is 9.5mm. I don't see any adapter being used in your example, leading me to believe it's not needed. True?
Please comment on the following: 1. using 2.5" in no way interferes with installing a PCIe NVMe SSD on the flip side. 2. with due soldering skill I can upgrade RAM beyond 16GB. 2-a. if "yes", what is the chipset limitation on the RAM capacity? 2-b. also, what are the technical requirements for RAM chip? I hope it is not artificially signature-bound to the apple brand or some other narrow HCL. Thank you.
I have replaced mine by watching you. A few months ago!! I have a 2014 Mac Mini, i5 1.4Ghz and 4Gb Ram, the hard drive has been updated to an SSD, to be more precise Sandisk SSD Plus 240GB. To have a faster external storage I have just ordered the Samsung 850 Evo. Would you recommend tearing down the mac mini again and put the Samsung one inside or keep the Sandisk one as it is?
Great tutorial. By mistake when I tried to disconnect the IR connecter (very tinny) I removed it from the mother board. Does anyone think that will damage the computer? Apart from that, computer is really fast now. Worth the investment.
Hello. Thanks for the video. I was able to do this and it works great. However the system is using 128 gigabytes of space on the ssd. It’s only a 250 gig drive. What did I do wrong? Thanks again!
hi , i want to install a ssd in my mac mini, do i have to clone the new drive or there is another way to get the new drive started up and install a fresh copy of mojave? please help if you can guys, thanks!
Great video! My question is: once you put the empty solid state disk, what you have to do to transfer the old's HD contents to the new disk? Ιs it done automatically or you have to do something about it? I would appreciate your assistance into this. Thanks. Nick K.
Once you've swapped the HD you can connect your old drive via an external interface to the unit and boot from it by pressing the option key (or ALT for us PC guys) during startup. Then download and install SuperDuper! (free trial) and clone the old contents over to your new drive (select the option to copy all files). That may take a long time so you may leave it overnight. Once the clone is done you have to open your system preferences and set the new HD as your main startup drive and you're done. Good luck!
Being how capacious modrn NVMe devices can be, is there any point at all to fall back on SATA? I am not aware of significant savings, if any, to be made by using SATA when m.2 is an available option (obviously, macos versions with proper NVMe EFI boot support are assumed for this question).
I run a print ship and have owned literally hundreds of Macs from 1986 till Today. Awesome machines like IIfx, Quadra 950, 9600, G3 and G4 PowerMacs. Over the years they have morphed into steaming piles of garbage. Ram soldered onto a motherboard and no ram slots? A four Gigabyte version to boot....... Calling that trashcan and iMacs "pro level" machines.....
These Mac mini's were never quick. SSD or not. At least the 4 Gigabyte versions. They were constantly thrashing the hard drive for swap space because they were ram starved. Pure garbage
It seems like pretty shoddy design to have to disassemble the whole machine with custom tools just to change the hard drive :S I guess that's the price you pay to have a compact machine.
