I today received 16gb dd3 rams for my mac mini and i am happy because 16gb give me the speed that i need.
Dock's program dance 1-2 sec and are ready in other few seconds, hd4000 use 768mb ram and give me more air in usual game as starcraft 2 .
The HDD 256gb will be the next upgrade but only when i will find a special offert or a price drop
Up that ram before anything else. That is a major bottleneck, and a cheap one to resolve. Next, look at storage. Mac mini drives are painfully slow. If you are on a budget and need lots of storage, a seagate momentus XT hybrid drive is a good compromise between performance and capacity. If capacity isn't that big a deal for you, grab an SSD. While the momentus is no sloth, there's nothing like the real thing.
Which SSD you get is up to you. As long as you avoid anything with a sandforce controller (with exception to intel, having actually FIXED the damn thing), you should be fine. I have a Neutron GTX and it performs just fine. Upgrade the firmware on the drive on a PC before dropping it into a your mini. Many drive support updates on a mac, but ALL of them support updating from a PC. The neutron supports updating on mac, although it a very roundabout pain in the butt kind of way (not that it matters since there are no updates yet), whereas the OCZ drives are very easy to update on mac.
You can also make your own fusion drive, which I won't go into detail here since it's needlessly villainized. OWC data doubler + SSD + stock drive should work fine.
