Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Apple Mac mini Desktop (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Intel Core i5 8500B) - Space Gray, MRTT2LL/A, (October, 2018) at the best online prices at eBay! Installed Samsung 840 Pro in 2011 mac mini I just upgraded my 2011 base model (with 8Gb ram) mac mini with an 128gb Samsung 840 pro SSD, but the hard disk write speed is only 260 (using Novabench)? This seems to be a bit slow vs what others are getting in these forums, anybody have any ideas?
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- OWC 1.0TB Electra 6G SSD DIY Upgrade Bundle for 2011, 2012 Mac Mini, Includes Data Doubler, 5-Piece Installation Toolkit 4.8 out of 5 stars 13 $144.75 $ 144.
- Mac mini Hard Drive or SSD Purchase Options In theory, just about any hard drive or SSD that meets the minimum requirements should work in the Mac mini. However, it always is best to buy from a trusted company with Mac knowledge for the most trouble-free experience.
- The Mac Mini can be broadly divided into four different generations. The first Mac Mini with a solid-state drive appeared in mid-2011 during the third generation, after Apple switched to an all-aluminum unibody design. These Mac Mini models have an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Bluetooth 4.0, and Thunderbolt ports.
Tips
By William Gallagher
Monday, July 15, 2019, 08:46 am PT (11:46 am ET)
Only Apple recommends buying its Macs with 128GB of SSD storage, because only Apple is trying to hit a price point. Everyone else —including us —will tell you that you need more, but nobody really tells you why. Here's why small SSDs are a problem, and what you can do.Monday, July 15, 2019, 08:46 am PT (11:46 am ET)
If you can't get more storage in your Mac mini, string external drives to it
It doesn't matter what anyone tells you, if you're buying a Mac on a budget then you are at least going to consider getting one that comes with only 128GB SSD storage. Maybe your budget is such that you have no other choice, but certainly you balk at spending another $200, $400 or more on increasing the storage.
Balk away, but do get that larger internal storage. If you can physically get enough cash together, go for the 256GB option as an absolute minimum. If you're not convinced, here's why you need it. And if you have already bought a 128GB machine, here's how to cope.
It's not enough
Yes, you're just writing the odd screenplay and doing some emailing. It's hard to imagine that work taking up an entire 128GB space —but then you don't get the entire space.
Top right, ringed in gold, that's the 128GB SSD in a 2018 Mac mini (Source:iFixit)
You lose a certain amount to macOS, and, incidentally, you'll temporarily lose much more whenever the Mac needs to update this to the next version.
Then you have to have apps and they add up. Microsoft Word on its own is over 2GB in size, for instance, but it's not an app's filesize that'll really kill you. It's the temporary space they all use while you're working. Image editors, for instance, will eat up gigabytes of temporary storage.
And that's not storage that can be managed in iCloud.
If you go below 5GB free on your SSD, macOS will nag you every few minutes, and recommend that you use iCloud to manage your files. There's a lot to be said for it, but it doesn't entirely solve the problem, it costs money to get enough space, and it can be supremely frustrating.
While Apple's Desktop & Documents feature is supposed to store your less-often used documents in iCloud, in practice when you're running out of space, it will move anything.
What's more, the Finder knows it's been moved to iCloud, but not all apps understand that and instead they think it's gone. There is little as scary as an app telling you that your most crucial document is missing.
Keep this clear frequently
Aim to leave 20GB free space on your Mac's SSD. That's enough to keep you out of the nagging zone even if you're working on images.
To keep that much clear, there are many, many things you can do. And fortunately there are ways to automate it so that you don't have to keep doing it or to keep wondering where your files are.
Start with the basics. Don't keep anything you don't need to. That downloads folder, for instance, is packed with items you've dealt with, that you don't need, or that you can download again if you ever want to. So trash them.
You can do that manually, and you will do it manually when you're really pushed for space, but you can also get your Mac to do it. Choose the Finder menu, click on Preferences, and then on Advanced.
Tell the Finder to empty the trash every 30 days
Tick to have the Mac automatically delete items after 30 days.
Next, delete temporary files like screenshots. If you take a lot of these, you find they all land on your desktop and they're not huge, but they add up. When you're done with them, throw 'em in the trash.
Apps
This one might surprise you. Quit apps that you're not using. So many apps use temporary space and, at least in theory, that stops when you quit the app.
Apple's Photos app also keeps a Recently Deleted folder. Go into that and tell it to delete everything. Certain video apps like Final Cut Pro X has a Move to Trash which does delete media, but doesn't always appear to put it in your regular trash.
Find the app's own empty trash option, if it has one, and quit it if it doesn't. Quit it anyway, and you'll reclaim some temporary storage space.
You should also restart your Mac occasionally, as that'll clear up more temporary storage space that hasn't been returned to macOS properly.
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There are also caches that you can find in your hidden Library folder and you could delete those, but Apple hides that folder for a reason. We'd avoid diving in there and deleting everything we see.Instead, we'd look to make bigger savings in space, such as exploiting how apps do not have to live in your Applications folder. They don't even have to be on the main startup drive.
You can plug in other, external drives and move your apps over to them.
External drives
Ideally, you should have a network attached storage device that lets you have multiple external drives, all backed up and all available across your network. However, if you had to buy the cheapest Mac possible, then you're probably not in the market for a NAS which, enclosure alone, can cost more than that Mac mini.
You may not be in the market for any external drive, but for under $100 you can get a 2TB hard drive. For between $100-$150, you can get between 4TB and 8TB. It's a lot more space for your money than you could get internally in your Mac.
That's still not a great solution if your 128GB SSD machine is a MacBook Air, but it is possible to dock that to your drives when you're at home or at your office. Have Keyboard Maestro automatically mount when your Mac wakes or, more crucially, dismount a drive when it goes to sleep.
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And if you have a Mac mini, external drives could be ideal.Keyboard Maestro can mount drives. It can also unmount them for you when your Mac goes to sleep, and that's handy for MacBook owners who can then safely disconnect external drives
Try to get a small external SSD, too. It'll cost you from $80 and up, but you should be able to get an SSD that's larger than your internal drive.
In that case, use it for both backup and extra storage. Get Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate your external drive on that external SSD, and then separately set up folders on it that you use manually.
You can create a separate Applications folder on that external SSD, and drag many of your larger applications to it. Not every app will work when launched from outside the Applications folder, but most will.
Just make sure that you re-add them to your Dock after you've moved them, or the Dock will simply complain that they don't exist.
Plan working storage
If you can buy external drives or if you have any old ones around your house, you can spread the load across them all —if you plan carefully.
There is no point keeping your most important work files anywhere but on the Mac's internal drive.
However, you can tell many apps to use these external drives for their temporary storage. Certain image editors like Pixelmator Pro won't let you do that, but video ones like Final Cut Pro X will. And video editors use up an enormous amount of storage space while you're working.
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Hazel can watch for particular files and act on them
External storage, especially on hard drives instead of SSD, will be slower than your internal drive. But it'll work, and you don't have the room to be fussy.
Plan archive storage
Then you can also make some decisions about files that you're no longer working on. If you finish a job and you are certain that you cannot ever need its files and documents again, you could delete them.
That's the hardest thing to do, though, and the one that is most likely to bite you in the ass.
So instead of deleting them, move your documents to an archive —on an external drive.
Every day or every week, or whenever you're up against it for space, move all your files that are over, say, a month old and drag them to your archive.
Just make sure that you also have some separate backup system. If your important document is on an external drive instead of an internal one, it's still not as safe as if you also have it backed up somewhere.
You'll never do it
The trouble with this idea of moving documents around yourself is that you'll never do it. You will never remember to religiously move old documents over to your archive. And when your Mac is constantly nagging that you're running low on space, you won't easily know what documents can be archived.
So don't do it. Get something to do it for you automatically.
Hazel has much better controls for managing your Mac's trash than macOS does
Use the file and folder management app Hazel. Tell it to move all your files and folders that are over a month old, and it will do it. All the time. Hazel watches your Mac and acts on triggers that you tell it to, such as spotting that a document was created so many days ago.
Hazel can then delete items, copy them, move them to other folders and so on.
It's even got a special section for dealing with the Trash which is far more fine-grained than the feature in macOS. Using Hazel, you can decide to have the trash empty itself every day, if you want.
And Hazel can also automatically trash items in your downloads folder that are old, too.
There are also software options for figuring out what's taking up all your space and while it's not the prettiest or the easiest to understand, we recommend the free OmniDiskSweeper for being comprehensive and fast.
OmniDiskSweeper rapidly scans your drive and helps you spot where space is being used up
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Or specifically for finding duplicate files, there's Gemini, which you can get as part of Setapp.It's an overhead
Yes, most apps cost money, and definitely so do external drives. When you're on a tight budget, of course these things can be too much.
Yet since there are all these tools, tips and methods for dealing with small storage space, the real reason it's such a problem is how much it takes out of you.
That notification that you're running out of space will drive you spare. The way you might have, for instance, a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud but you don't have the room to download more than one app at a time, is going to make you weep.
Once you've been through all of this space-saving, though, and you find that your Mac says you've got 20GB free space, you'll feel like you've won a lottery.
Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.
Aluminum 'Unibody' Mac mini Q&A
Update Published November 21, 2018
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How do you upgrade the storage in the Aluminum 'Unibody' Mac mini models? What type of hard drive(s) or SSD(s) do they each support?
There are five different lines of Aluminum 'Unibody' Mac mini systems -- the 'Mid-2010,' 'Mid-2011,' 'Late 2012', 'Late 2014' and 'Late 2018' -- with notable differences in supported storage.
Photo Credit: Apple, Inc. (Non-Server Mid-2010 - Left, Mid-2011 & Late 2012 - Right)
Identification Help
If you're not sure which Aluminum Mac mini model you have, the optical drive equipped 'Mid-2010' models and current 'Late 2018' 'Space Gray' models should be easy to spot (at least for now), but many models in between these lines are more of a challenge.
All Aluminum Mac mini models can be precisely identified by the Model Identifier in software or externally by EMC Number, and more details about specific identifiers are provided in EveryMac.com's extensive Mac Identification section.
To locate the model identifier in software, select 'About This Mac' under the Apple Menu on your computer and click the 'More Info..' button. If the Mac mini is running OS X 10.7 'Lion' or later, you will need to click the 'System Report' button after clicking 'More Info..' as well.
For the pre-Late 2014 Mac mini models, the EMC number is visible upon removing the bottom 'spin off' panel to the right of the memory slots (when the ports are facing you). It is on the bottom of the 'Late 2014' and 'Late 2018' models toward the ports.
As always, EveryMac.com has hand documented the model identifiers and EMC numbers unique to each model, which are most easily visualized as a chart:
Alu. Mac mini | Subfamily | Model ID | EMC No. |
Mid-2010 | |||
Mid-2010 | |||
Mid-2010 | |||
Mid-2011 | |||
Mid-2011 | |||
Mid-2011 | |||
Mid-2011 | |||
Late 2012 | |||
Late 2012 | |||
Late 2012 | |||
Late 2012 | |||
Late 2012 | |||
Late 2014 | |||
Late 2014 | |||
Late 2014 | |||
Late 2014 | |||
Late 2018 | |||
Late 2018 | |||
Late 2018 |
EveryMac.com's Ultimate Mac Lookup feature -- as well as the EveryMac app -- also can identify these models by their Serial Numbers.
Storage Types, Dimensions & Requirements
Regular 'Mid-2010' Aluminum 'Unibody' Mac mini models, which have optical drives, support a single 2.5-inch, 9.5 mm tall, 3 Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA Revision 2.0) hard drive or SSD (or two storage drives if you remove the optical drive). The oddball Mac mini 'Core 2 Duo' 2.66 Server (Mid-2010) supports two storage drives of the same type (and no optical drive).
All 'Mid-2011' and 'Late 2012' models hold two 2.5-inch storage drives with the same 9.5 mm height restriction, but have faster 6 Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA Revision 3.0) support.
The non-server 'Mid-2011' and 'Late 2012' models, which only ship with one hard drive by default, a second hard drive or SSD is supported, but one has to purchase the cable needed to attach the drive to the board before installation is possible.
A user from the MacRumors forums first determined that the needed part is referred to as the 'Bottom Hard Drive Flex Cable' (Apple Part Number 922-9560) and successfully installed a second drive. More recently, site sponsor Other World Computing began offering a 'Data Doubler' upgrade kit for the Aluminum Mac mini models that includes everything needed to perform this upgrade -- the cable, drive bracket, precisely sized screwdrivers and screws -- in one convenient package.
The 'Late 2014' models have a 6 Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA Revision 3.0) connector for a 2.5-Inch hard drive or SSD in addition to a proprietary PCIe connector for a 'blade' SSD. As first noted by site sponsor OWC, the cable to connect this SSD to the PCIe connector is not present unless the system is configured with a 'Fusion Drive' at the time of initial purchase. However, it is possible to buy this cable later. This 'PCIe SSD Cable Connector' is part number 821-00010-A.
The current 'Late 2018' models have onboard storage and it cannot be upgraded at all after the initial system purchase.
These details can be helpfully summarized accordingly:
Alu. Mac mini | Subfamily | Model ID | Dimensions | Interface |
Mid-2010 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 2.0 x2* | ||
Mid-2010 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 2.0 x2* | ||
Mid-2010 Oct 24, 2015 We have a full license for LabVIEW 2015, and received the software on a USB Flash Drive. I've used this successfully to install LabVIEW on my Windows PC, but am puzzled how to install LabVIEW on a Mac. When we got LabVIEW on separate DVDs, there was a MAC DVD and a Linux DVD, but there's only the single Flash Drive. I've searched through the Files and Folders on this Drive, looking for Mac. LabVIEW is development software that engineers can use to build custom test, design, and control systems in a graphical programming environment. Multisim Education Edition Multisim is a circuit simulation tool built for educators to teach analog, digital, and power electronics by connecting simulation to experimentation. Labview for mac download. Jan 03, 2019 LabVIEW 2018 Mac Crack National Instruments (NI), has announced the release of LabVIEW 2018 For Mac Cracked system design software. The latest version of LabVIEW Mac delivers speed improvements, new and improved features, and fixed bugs. NI LabVIEW Full Version is a graphical programming language that uses icons instead of lines of text to create applications. | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 2.0 x2 | ||
Mid-2011 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Mid-2011 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Mid-2011 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Mid-2011 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2012 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2012 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2012 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2012 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2012 | 2.5' 9.5 mm | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2014 | 2.5' 9.5 mm Blade SSD | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2014 | 2.5' 9.5 mm Blade SSD | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2014 | 2.5' 9.5 mm Blade SSD | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2014 | 2.5' 9.5 mm Blade SSD | SATA 3.0 x2 | ||
Late 2018 | Onboard† | Onboard† | ||
Late 2018 | Onboard† | Onboard† | ||
Late 2018 | Onboard† | Onboard† |
* By default, one SATA 2.0 connector in these models is occupied by an optical drive.
† These models have onboard PCIe-based storage that cannot be upgraded after the initial system purchase.
Hard Drive Upgrade Official Disclaimer & Cautions
To upgrade the memory in the Aluminum 'Unibody' Mac mini models released before and after the Late 2014 models, Apple has made it straightforward. Replacing the hard drive or hard drives is a more complicated procedure and Apple does not support users performing this upgrade themselves.
In the User Guide, Apple formally states the following:
Except for memory, do not attempt to replace or repair any components inside your Mac mini. If your Mac mini needs service, consult the service and support information that came with your Mac mini for information about how to contact an Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple for service.
If you install items other than memory, you risk damaging your equipment, and such damage isn't covered by the limited warranty on your Mac mini.
As Apple does not consider the hard drive to be a 'customer installable part,' EveryMac.com cannot recommend that users perform the upgrade themselves. Most likely should instead add a quick and easy external hard drive or alternately hire a professional. Given the small and densely packed nature of the Aluminum Mac mini models this certainly is not a good system to upgrade yourself without substantial experience upgrading the hard drive in similar systems.
Hard Drive Upgrade Instructions
However, for highly experienced users, upgrading the hard drive or hard drives -- or swapping in one or more SSDs -- is difficult, but feasible nevertheless.
These videos from OWC cover the procedure for the optical-drive equipped 'Mid-2010' models and the optical drive-less 'Mid-2010' Server, 'Mid-2011,' and 'Late 2012' models, in a step-by-step fashion:
'Mid-2010' Mac mini (One Hard Drive, One Optical Drive)
'Mid-2010' Mac mini Server (Dual Hard Drives, No Optical Drive)
'Mid-2011' & 'Late 2012' Mac mini (Dual Hard Drives, No Optical Drive)
It is hoped that by watching the videos you should be able to determine whether or not you feel comfortable performing the upgrade yourself or if you would rather hire a professional.
Mac mini Hard Drive or SSD Purchase Options
In theory, just about any hard drive or SSD that meets the minimum requirements should work in the Mac mini. However, it always is best to buy from a trusted company with Mac knowledge for the most trouble-free experience.
In addition to the convenient storage upgrade kit for applicable Aluminum Mac mini models, Other World Computing sells compatible hard drives and SSDs and offers an installation service, as well.
In the UK and Ireland, site sponsor Flexx sells Mac mini compatible SSDs with free shipping. The company provides flat rate shipping to France, Germany, and Switzerland and inexpensive shipping for all of Europe, too.
In Australia, site sponsor RamCity sells Mac mini compatible SSDs, in addition to memory, with fast, flat-rate shipping Australia-wide.
In Southeast Asia, site sponsor SimplyMac.sg sells Mac mini compatible storage, as well as memory, with free delivery -- and optional upgrade service -- in Singapore and flat rate shipping to Brunei, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
Also see:
- How do you upgrade the RAM in the Aluminum 'Unibody' Mac mini models? What type of RAM do they use? How much RAM do they actually support?
- How do you upgrade the hard drive in the Polycarbonate Intel Mac mini models? What type of hard drive do they support? Is it possible to replace the optical drive with a second hard drive?
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