Ultimate performance will always be better on newer models. Pair it with a good monitorĪ new Mac is an expensive thing there's no denying that. If this is the case, the system won't post, so it's easy to spot. Remove one, reboot, and check About This Mac again to verify.īy doing it a stick at a time, you can easily identify if you have any bad RAM. If not, you'll need to go back in and troubleshoot your installation one stick at a time. If it shows the amount of RAM you installed, all is well. To verify all is well, boot up the Mac Mini and check out the About This Mac information.
The most you can install in the 2012 Mac Mini, 16GB of RAM is a great performance upgrade, and this kit from Crucial will slot right in.īesides adding an SSD, the next best thing to do to give your old Mac Mini some additional legs for present-day computing is to add more RAM. Insert the logic board removal tool into the holes pictured.Remove the final screw from the logic board with a Torx T6 screwdriver.You will need to detach any remaining items from the logic board at this point, including the wireless shroud and the IR cable.Follow steps 1-17 from the section above to remove the existing drive and prepare your new SSD boot drive.You can use either a hard drive or an SSD, or as we have here, a Seagate Firecuda hybrid drive, not unlike the Fusion Drive Apple uses in some of its machines. You could reuse the existing hard drive, but since it's over six years old, it makes much better sense to use a fresh one. Not everyone will want to do this, but it is possible to install a second drive in the 2012 Mac Mini to maximize its storage potential.
Professional pry tool kit (opens in new tab) ($10 at Amazon)īetter than using your fingers, this pry tool kit is worth having in your tool kit for those hard to remove and tiny parts. You will want to backup all your data, create the Fusion drive and then restore to the new combined drive.Pry Tool Kit (Image credit: Amazon) (opens in new tab) You could re-do your installation and create another "fusion drive" that would be 1.13TB in size. You could format it FAT32 or HFS+ to make a separate drive for 128GB of storage to be used however you like - diskutil eraseDisk fat32 Untitled GPT /dev/disk0 You could just format the drive to get rid of the boot partition and not use the drive - diskutil eraseDisk %noformat% disk0 Or US$400, respectively, or a 768 GB SSD for an extra US$1300. Traditional hard drive with 128 GB of flash RAM - for an extra US$250 This model also could be custom configured with a 3 TB hard drive forĪn extra US$150, a 1 TB or 3 TB "fusion drive" - which combines a It's actually not a phantom drive there's a 128GB SSD that originally came with the Mac mini to be used in conjunction with the HDD as a "Fusion Drive."