Hoping to get some guidance, and sorry for the noob question. Purchased a new SSD (Evo 850) and 16GB Ram for our 2012 base model mini. Never done this before, but the hardware procedure/installation seems fairly straight forward. OSX re-install procedure on the new drive has me a bit confused though. It seems I need to make a recovery disc on a USB drive according to iFixit. Do I need to find the OSX version that originally came with our Mini (not sure what version it was), or the newest version that is now installed (10.11.3)? Was hoping I could just swap out drives and not use a recovery disc, looks like that is not the case.
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Help Appreciated- SSD Install on '12 Mini.
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You can download and use for a 30 day free period, Carbon Copy Cloner. You can use that to clone your old drive to your new SDD with no problems at all. That is what I did with the exact same setup. I also have the Evo 850 and upgraded my Mac Mini to 16 Gb as well.
CCC worked like a dream, I ended up buying it.
CCC worked like a dream, I ended up buying it.
1. Cloning your drive is easiest way as Butchie-T suggested.
2. When opening Mini be careful with the cables, they are fragile!
If you haven't previously done any PC repair it might be better to pay someone to do it for you, if you broke any components repair will be costly...
2. When opening Mini be careful with the cables, they are fragile!
If you haven't previously done any PC repair it might be better to pay someone to do it for you, if you broke any components repair will be costly...
I used an external interface, mounted the SSD, used the built in Disk Util to copy the partition from the OEM HDD to the SSD. Booted externally to confirm, swapped out the drive, set it to the boot drive, done.
I 2nd what Ebenezum said. If you do the installation yourself, study the videos and online repair guides. Get one of the pre-packaged install kits. Be patient and don't force anything. I found having both the sharp-end spduger https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Spudger/IF145-002-2 and the green spduger that came with the OWC kit http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIYIMM11D2/ useful.
Take a look at a post I created after I did those upgrades: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/replaced-2012-internal-hdd-with-ssd-the-easy-way.1727495/