WATCH THIS ONE! This is by far the simplest and most concise video. I wish I’d watch watched this one before the OWC video as it explains it so much better! Thank you 🙏
Great job, and especially nice that you showed the minimum amount of disassembly required to get at the drive bay. Should have cleaned all that dust while you had it opened up, though! I think it's safer to get an external enclosure, any cheap one will do, and set up the new drive before doing the installation. You can either clone your existing drive over or install whatever version of MacOS you plan to run. Then boot from the external and make sure everything is working. Only after that should the old drive be pulled and the new drive installed. This is the only way to be sure that the new drive you just bought actually works 100%! Even if you don't have an enclosure already sitting around a decent USB 3.0 (or even 3.1 Gen2) enclosure can be had for around $20 and is a good place to put your old drive once you have the new one installed inside your Mac, giving you some extra storage or another backup destination.
Just upgraded my 2012 last week with an SSD. Didn’t have to disconnect any cables except for the drive itself. Just slightly pushed aside the WiFi antenna and fan. I do have the server version.
Something that a lot of guides missing is getting mid to late 2012 mac mini is like a lottery. Those who are unlucky may have the original hard drive sits on the upper bay which requires complete removal of the motherboard and the bracket to get into it, this might be difficult for some people (if this is the case for you, I suggest looking for a complete disassembly guide). cheers.
Good job on this procedure for the upgrade. I use my Mac Mini for Music Recording, and it is dreadfully slow. So I did this upgrade today. My experience was this: First off let me say in another lifetime I was a Electronic Technician. I worked in the Marine Electronics Industry. In the 90's I decided it was time to give it up. Reason? I was interfacing a Navigation System to a Radar PPI (Display). I had to remove a resistor, took me 2 hours to locate it. It was something like 3 cm square when I finally did locate it. Which brings me to this job, the connectors are minuscule and delicate, seems way smaller than the video makes it our to be, good job on the closeups! So anyone doing this job, go slow, be very careful. Patience!!! Took me a long time to seat the new drive, using the Credit Card trick didn't work for me, but I managed to get it aligned and seated properly. A mini flashlight and a magnified glass helped a great deal. My only error was not getting one of my memory modules seated , easily corrected. My one total failure was doing a restore from the old hard drive to the new SSD. I'm not an experienced Apple user. In the end I had to a fresh online install. First time it failed, I saw it want to install OS Lion, which was probably the original OS After doing a Power On Reset, my second attempt of the Online Install went great. It came up as Mojave for the install this time. So thanks again for doing this video, I'll be able to get a few more years out of this Mac Mini with the new Drive.
Tip you dont need to make a dvd iso and using that method many mac os kvm repositoried have python files that can be used to download mac os once downloaded if you are on windows you can use transmac to flash the usb on linux use dmg2img to get an img file and flash it and on mac use disk utility to restore
Tyler Johnson I disagree, it’s a last ditch resort Incase all else fails. If you don’t have another Mac it can be quite a pain to get it after you’ve already done the upgrade.
Tyler Johnson yes assuming recovery mode hasn’t failed and that cloud service is working, but I’ve ran into an instance where I had to wait about 7 hours to download from cloud as it kept failing or telling me to try again later and this was fairly recent... so maybe I’m just old school, but I do have reasons for it...
Denver Morgan the short answer is yes. The threaded hole on the Samsung drive oddly does not match up perfect with the drive cage and is of by less than 1mm, I disassembled and re-assembled 3 Times to make sure the drive wasn’t crooked but it doesn’t appear to be. I considered putting the cage under my drill press but decided it wasn’t worth it and so here we have a crooked screw. I suppose I must have left that out of the video.
Watched five videos on this procedure today. Yours is by far the easiest to understand. Thanks!
WATCH THIS ONE! This is by far the simplest and most concise video. I wish I’d watch watched this one before the OWC video as it explains it so much better! Thank you 🙏
Great job, and especially nice that you showed the minimum amount of disassembly required to get at the drive bay. Should have cleaned all that dust while you had it opened up, though!
I think it's safer to get an external enclosure, any cheap one will do, and set up the new drive before doing the installation. You can either clone your existing drive over or install whatever version of MacOS you plan to run. Then boot from the external and make sure everything is working. Only after that should the old drive be pulled and the new drive installed. This is the only way to be sure that the new drive you just bought actually works 100%! Even if you don't have an enclosure already sitting around a decent USB 3.0 (or even 3.1 Gen2) enclosure can be had for around $20 and is a good place to put your old drive once you have the new one installed inside your Mac, giving you some extra storage or another backup destination.
yeah the enclosure is only $10 on amazon lol. they didn't even advertise the adapter they used lol.
Just upgraded my 2012 last week with an SSD. Didn’t have to disconnect any cables except for the drive itself. Just slightly pushed aside the WiFi antenna and fan. I do have the server version.
Yeah, you don't "have to", but I wanted to show it a little more "properly" for the video so that it may reduce people breaking wires. ;)
Something that a lot of guides missing is getting mid to late 2012 mac mini is like a lottery. Those who are unlucky may have the original hard drive sits on the upper bay which requires complete removal of the motherboard and the bracket to get into it, this might be difficult for some people (if this is the case for you, I suggest looking for a complete disassembly guide). cheers.
Good job on this procedure for the upgrade. I use my Mac Mini for Music Recording, and it is dreadfully slow. So I did this upgrade today. My experience was this: First off let me say in another lifetime I was a Electronic Technician. I worked in the Marine Electronics Industry. In the 90's I decided it was time to give it up. Reason? I was interfacing a Navigation System to a Radar PPI (Display). I had to remove a resistor, took me 2 hours to locate it. It was something like 3 cm square when I finally did locate it. Which brings me to this job, the connectors are minuscule and delicate, seems way smaller than the video makes it our to be, good job on the closeups! So anyone doing this job, go slow, be very careful. Patience!!! Took me a long time to seat the new drive, using the Credit Card trick didn't work for me, but I managed to get it aligned and seated properly. A mini flashlight and a magnified glass helped a great deal. My only error was not getting one of my memory modules seated , easily corrected. My one total failure was doing a restore from the old hard drive to the new SSD. I'm not an experienced Apple user. In the end I had to a fresh online install. First time it failed, I saw it want to install OS Lion, which was probably the original OS After doing a Power On Reset, my second attempt of the Online Install went great. It came up as Mojave for the install this time. So thanks again for doing this video, I'll be able to get a few more years out of this Mac Mini with the new Drive.
I saw a video where a guy put a piece of tape on the top of the SSD and left a handle on top where he slid it into position,..pretty successfully !!
Tip you dont need to make a dvd iso and using that method many mac os kvm repositoried have python files that can be used to download mac os once downloaded if you are on windows you can use transmac to flash the usb on linux use dmg2img to get an img file and flash it and on mac use disk utility to restore
This was extremely helpful to me. Thank you!
I am thinking of doing this. Thank you for a concise and informative video.
I have a question ..... I have a Mac mini late 2012 2.3 i7....can I upgrade to 2T solid state drive ?
I don't see why not.
You should have make use of this opportunity to dust out the internal, a lazy upgrade I would say.
Amazingly this is the best video that I’ve seen for this.
But: downloading the OS iso serves no purpose.
Tyler Johnson I disagree, it’s a last ditch resort Incase all else fails. If you don’t have another Mac it can be quite a pain to get it after you’ve already done the upgrade.
Coty0010 You can just restore from the cloud or download and install it directly from recovery mode.
Tyler Johnson yes assuming recovery mode hasn’t failed and that cloud service is working, but I’ve ran into an instance where I had to wait about 7 hours to download from cloud as it kept failing or telling me to try again later and this was fairly recent... so maybe I’m just old school, but I do have reasons for it...
Coty0010 I see. I’ve done this several times and never had recovery mode fail me.
Very good video though. Very instructional and helpful!
Tyler Johnson glad you enjoyed it!
hi, approximately how long did it take to transfer data from usb hdd?
Antoshka1tony hello, I don’t really remember exactly, but I think it was about 2 maybe 3 hours at the most.
Did you cross thread one of the hard drive screws? Doesn't look flush.
Denver Morgan the short answer is yes. The threaded hole on the Samsung drive oddly does not match up perfect with the drive cage and is of by less than 1mm, I disassembled and re-assembled 3 Times to make sure the drive wasn’t crooked but it doesn’t appear to be. I considered putting the cage under my drill press but decided it wasn’t worth it and so here we have a crooked screw. I suppose I must have left that out of the video.
What is the max resolution this Mini will do ?
2560x1440
Not enough cat in this video :( Very disappointed!