Going from a spinner to SSD is like going from hobbling around on crutches to driving a Formula One racing car at 250mph. Doubling the memory from 4GB to 8GB is the difference between a full and an empty 18 wheeler lorry.
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Late 2012 Mac mini still worth upgrading!
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Going from a spinner to SSD is like going from hobbling around on crutches to driving a Formula One racing car at 250mph. Doubling the memory from 4GB to 8GB is the difference between a full and an empty 18 wheeler lorry.
Uhh, Don't worry about the "'newer'" minis noisedude, yours is slow in an absolute sense. You are correct about the cause of your performance bottleneck. A quick and painless solution would be to connect an SSD by using an external USB 3.0 housing. With two Macs it should be simple work to download a copy of OS X and install it on the SSD. Then your 2012 i7 will fly.
I do not understand why the speed of newer minis matters in your case. Some 2014s have faster storage than yours ever will and some may be as slow or even slower. It does not matter. Your Slow 2012 i7 is a silicon based oxymoron. You already have 16GB of RAM. Get fast noisedude. Get fast quick!
Stick a 1TB Angelbird SSD in there and keep everything clean.
Please advise me... I have an old 'late 2012' mac mini i5.... it often runs real slow, flying pizzas etc... original hardware (2x2GB memory). I'm no techie, but as far as I can see the hard drive is nowhere near full. Why has it slowed down? What would speed it up?
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Install 16gb of RAM - that'd make a pretty big difference, in addition, add an SSD if you can. 2x8GB of RAM is cheap - no more than £60. It's super easy to install yourself too.
On the SSD, the best would be to install it internally - but that can be hard if you don't know what you are doing. You could however run it through a USB 3 enclosure (cheap) and it'd still be faster than the built in drive - unless it has a fusion drive?>
The memory upgrade advice is good, and it will only take a couple minutes, just twist off the bottom and swap them for the old RAM. See this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041#three
If you just want it simple, get a Samsung T5 SSD. I have three of the previous generation T3's and they are great - very fast. These are USB SSD's that you just plug into the Mini, no need to open anything up. https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/portable/t5/
Shop around... a quick search shows the 500gb model for $100 and 1tb model for $180. Clone your internal disk to the T5 with Carbon Copy Cloner. The free version can be used for a month: https://bombich.com
Now just set the T5 as you startup disk in System preferences and reboot. You will be amazed at the difference.
Here is how the older 1tb T3 performs on my 2012 Mini, the T5 might be a little faster. For comparison, the original 500gb hard drive in the base mini only gives you 100MB/sec when it is brand new. So an external T5 is going to be four times as fast as your Mini was before it started running slow.
If your budget is limited, I would just get a 500gb T5 for starters, you could add more RAM later. that will only cost you a hundred bucks, you don't have to open anything up and IMO, the SSD is going to make the biggest difference in the "feel" of the computer.
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Nope, I've never had a reason to set up any Windows domains in my home
Nope, I've never had a reason to set up any Windows domains in my home
I meant for Mac policy enforcement. "Apple's OS X Server has an ace up its sleeve with the inclusion of a modestly equipped MDM platform baked right into the Profile Manager service. The very same service used to managed wired nodes on a LAN can also be used to wirelessly manage mobile devices — both OS X and iOS — over the internet. With the ability to host up to 5,000 devices on a single server, factored in with the relatively low cost of an Apple Server, running a MDM server has never been this inexpensive or simple to setup — especially compared to other pricer MDM suites. Lest we forget, being a 1st-party Apple application, support is always included at no additional cost." From: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-use-os-x-server-profile-manager-for-mdm/