Hi peeps,
Finally got the chance to revive a slow Mac Mini of late 2012 and I’m very happy with the end result. A product of 8 years running and running like new with the Samsung 860 EVO SSD. I would recommend to upgrade the Mac Mini if you have a standard disk when you first purchase it. It makes a whole lot of difference to run SSD on it. It’s a no brainer.
I bought the SSD during a Courts Singapore sales, at around SGD 81.00 for a 256GB storage size. The model is MZ-76E250BW. I’ve also purchase a FLUJO USB 3.0 External SSD Hard Drive Enclosure for easy cloning of the existing HDD via the Mac’s built-in app Disk Utility. Basically, you first have to install the Samsung SSD to the hard drive enclosure, to use it as a USB external hard drive. Then, under Mac’s Disk Utility, highlight the new USB external SSD enclosure and perform a format. Do take note, the formatting part here, would be the “Erase” button on Disk Utility. Erase the new SSD to the same format as the main standard disk that comes with the Mac. Mine was AFPS format from the standard disk. To find out the actual format of the main standard disk drive, highlight the main hard drive and the info will pop up on the right side of the page
Once the formatting is done, restart the Mac Mini and press the “Command + R” (Mac Keyboard) to enter recovery mode as soon as you hear the boot up chime. For those on Windows Keyboard, press “Windows Key + ALT + R” to enter recovery mode as soon as you hear the chime. Under Disk Utility, go to “Restore” and HIGHLIGHT the new SSD drive and then SELECT restore from the main hard drive. the restore function here basically means cloning. It might take a while to restore depending on the data size you have on the Mac Mini.
There you go, now that you have a clone MacOS to the new SSD. It’s time for the sweat part. Detaching the Mac Mini takes alot of patience. There are tons of tutorials on Youtube already. I’m not going to elaborate on it.
