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How to increase the performance of my late 2012 Mac Mini?

Those speeds are max burst speeds, am I correct? Cause I have never used that benchmark program.
The theoretical maximum, or even the maximum speed achieved in a benchmark (or even a copy), is the same as the top speed of a car. Sure it is achievable but depending on the car you need either more time to reach it and/or you can't keep it for the same time.
 
Trusteft said:
Those speeds are max burst speeds, am I correct?
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Are you talking about the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test? It's free, you can download it from the app store so you can try it yourself. The help menu explains what the program does and how it can be used. There have been various threads that discuss the meaning of the results, but Blackmagic makes video peripherals and they provide the test as a way for users to determine whether their disks are fast enough for continuous capture in different formats. I find it helpful as a way to compare different disks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12
 
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I use the same system with external usb3 boot drive, I also have 16 gb ram. I originally wanted to install internally but used external as a temporary solution while under warranty period. There were no compelling reasons to do that after as it's performance was awesome! I do store my entire movie and music libraries on the spinner as they are both large. I also keep one generation of MacOS behind on the internal, I am always on a beta it seems, and a Win10 partition. I am no stranger to installing drives. The Powerbook g4 was the hardest I've ever had to do, and did it numerous times successfully. Unless your do something hardcore on the mini, in real world use will make no difference.
 
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I don't need to have in incredible performance but I like things to be fast. The computer will mostly be used by my kids when they do their homework. I'll keep my profile on it incase my iMac ever goes down. I'm thinking the external drive will be the easiest way to go. Just plug and play.

Do I have to change any settings to direct the computer to use the SSD to start up?
 
Boyd01 said:
That should be a very fast system, it has a quad core CPU - I have the next model up with the 2.6ghz i use it exclusively for video editing. The easiest way to speed it up is to move the system to an external USB 3.0 SSD. I'm using a 1TB Samsung T3 but there are many other choices. Just use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a clone of your internal drive to the external SSD, then select it under startup disk in System Preferences and reboot.

Quick and no need to open up your Mini. Your hard drive would have had a write speed of about 100MB/sec when it was new. A good external SSD will be about 400MB/sec - four times faster. It is just a bit slower than an internal SSD (I get 450MB/sec with my original Apple internal SSD).
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Quick question about this. My Mac Mini has a 1TB drive that is about 3/4 full. I bought a 500GB SSD. Would Carbon Copy still be able to clone the whole drive?
 
iMas70 said:
Quick question about this. My Mac Mini has a 1TB drive that is about 3/4 full. I bought a 500GB SSD. Would Carbon Copy still be able to clone the whole drive?
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Buy an external drive and then copy the less important stuff to that. That will also help keep the SSD free for the more performance dependent stuff in the future
 
iMas70 said:
Quick question about this. My Mac Mini has a 1TB drive that is about 3/4 full. I bought a 500GB SSD. Would Carbon Copy still be able to clone the whole drive?
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Carbon Copy makes identical copies of one disk to another disk. You can boot off the copy and it will behave exactly the same as the original. In the process of cloning you can choose files to exclude. If you want to move to a smaller disk, you will need to leave something out.
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twalk said:
Buy an external drive and then copy the less important stuff to that.
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That is also a good idea, do the "housecleaning" on the internal drive first, so that it will fit on the 500gb SSD, then clone the internal drive to the SSD. However, you might ask yourself if it wouldn't make more sense to return the 500gb SSD and get a 1TB as opposed to buying a separate external drive.

But you should have one or more external hard drives for backups anyway. ;)
 
My documents and photos take up a lot of space (there are 4K drone videos in the mix). I’ll be all set if I can move everything thing except for those things. They are on my main computer and I have backups so I could delete them off of the Mini.
 
iMas70 said:
My documents and photos take up a lot of space (there are 4K drone videos in the mix). I’ll be all set if I can move everything thing except for those things. They are on my main computer and I have backups so I could delete them off of the Mini.
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Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would you have to delete them at all? If you are adding the SSD you can keep the HDD. Speed will come from booting from the SSD and having your applications installed there. You can use the HDD for large file storage.
 
Personally, I would always prefer an internal SSD. You also save one USB slot.
I'm always debating getting a larger internal SSD. However, to be really worth it I'd rather buy a 2GB SSD - and these are still rather pricey (and I don't want a Fusion Drive).
So, I'm still waiting for that updated Mini and putting money toward that (or an iMac), rather than messing with the current hardware.
 
MRrainer said:
Personally, I would always prefer an internal SSD. You also save one USB slot.
I'm always debating getting a larger internal SSD. However, to be really worth it I'd rather buy a 2GB SSD - and these are still rather pricey (and I don't want a Fusion Drive).
So, I'm still waiting for that updated Mini and putting money toward that (or an iMac), rather than messing with the current hardware.
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I hope you mean 2TB. Else, welcome to the late 90s. :p
 
MRrainer said:
Personally, I would always prefer an internal SSD. You also save one USB slot.
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So would I. But as many Mini owners have said, performing the surgery on this model is just complicated and daunting enough for many folks that an external SSD is "good enough" and avoids having to take a machine apart, hoping nothing is broken in the process. All my other SSD upgrades on other machines, Macs and Windows machines alike, are all internal. I'm usually comfortable swapping out internal drives. I'm gun shy about this model.
 
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The SSD upgrade on the 2012 is doable. If the HD is in the right slot, it's also not necessary to disassemble the whole thing, you just have to remove a couple of parts.

I wouldn't do it every other week, but the performance increase is worth it once or twice in the lifetime of the Mini.
 
MRrainer said:
The SSD upgrade on the 2012 is doable. If the HD is in the right slot, it's also not necessary to disassemble the whole thing, you just have to remove a couple of parts.

I wouldn't do it every other week, but the performance increase is worth it once or twice in the lifetime of the Mini.
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I'm like 80-85% sure I could do it withour wrecking anything. And if I had a mid-2011 Mini, with USB 2.0 where an external SSD is really not useful and wouldn't be much of an improvement (if at all) over a spinner, I'd probably attempt the surgery since the payoff would be so great relative to the risk. YMMV, of course, but for me the risk doesn't justify the reward on a USB 3 model.

For what it's worth. mine is the Server model, with a 2.6 GHz quad i7 and two, 1 TB spinners. One of the spinners is now a backup boot drive and recovery drive (among other things, I use CCC three times a week to keep it updated), and the other is mostly idle and used as a scratchpad area.
 
MRrainer said:
The SSD upgrade on the 2012 is doable. If the HD is in the right slot, it's also not necessary to disassemble the whole thing, you just have to remove a couple of parts.

I wouldn't do it every other week, but the performance increase is worth it once or twice in the lifetime of the Mini.
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Won’t be getting a Samsung T5 in there though....
 
ziggy29 said:
I'm like 80-85% sure I could do it withour wrecking anything.
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So if you were old and "running slowly", would you get some surgery you didn't really need if the doctor said there was a 15 to 20 percent chance you would end up crippled? :D

But you're right about it being a tougher call on the 2011 with only USB 2.0. You could use a thunderbolt external SSD though.

I would not be comfortable with only backing up my primary machine "three times a week". I have a Time Capsule and BackBlaze doing continuous backups, I do weekly CCC clones and weekly time machine backups to a drive I keep offsite. But that's just my primary all-purpose computer. My iTunes server is cloned every night with CCC and I rotate the backup drives once a week. I have a quad mini that I only use for video, and I back that up with CCC whenever it's used (which isn't every day).
 
I opted to follow the same solution on my Mac Mini. I bought a 500GB Samsung T5. I ran carbon copy and made a copy of my internal drive. How do I make the USB drive my boot drive now?
 
I tried System Preferences -> Startup Disk, but for some reason the USB didn't show up as an option.
 
hiphop wrote:
"I tried System Preferences -> Startup Disk, but for some reason the USB didn't show up as an option."

Before going further, could you try the following and get back to us:
1. Power down, all the way off
2. Press the power on button
3. IMMEDIATELY hold down the option key, and KEEP HOLDING IT DOWN until the startup manager appears
4. Do you see the t5 on the startup manager's list of bootable devices?

If you DO NOT, my -guess- is:
- that the clone didn't "complete" for some reason (unlikely)
- that the t5 (like many "pre-packaged" external drives) has some kind of proprietary software (perhaps having something to do with drive-level encryption) at the "driver level" -- and that this software is interfering with permitting the Mac OS to "be seen" to the Mac as bootable.

If you think it's #2 above, I believe some searching might find a Samsung utility that can remove this software. After which you can re-initialize the t5 using Disk Utility, and try to do another "clone".
 
What's your OS?

You should format the T5 as HFS+ journaled, and with GUID partitioning scheme. After that make a bootable CCC-copy.
If you did just that, then I don't know what's the problem, sorry.

If you got a 10.13.x, I believe at least you need the latest CCC to work with that and the newest and greatest APFS. I am not totally sure what Mike Bombich promises today about the compatibility of the newest Apple file system, APFS, and CCC.
 
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