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Looking to Make Mac Mini Faster

SAL8116

SAL8116

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 24, 2010
198
7
Florida
My current set-up is

2.3GHz Intel core i7

16gb 1600mhz DDR3 Ram

1TB HD with 860GB still available.


I'm currently looking into a SSD drive, but don't know which brand or what size to go with? Obviously I don't need 1TB. I was thinking someone in the 500GB area. Cause I also use a backup drive which most of my stuff is on.

So any other ideas on how to make my Mac mini faster?
 
SAL8116 said:
My current set-up is

2.3GHz Intel core i7

16gb 1600mhz DDR3 Ram

1TB HD with 860GB still available.


I'm currently looking into a SSD drive, but don't know which brand or what size to go with? Obviously I don't need 1TB. I was thinking someone in the 500GB area. Cause I also use a backup drive which most of my stuff is on.

So any other ideas on how to make my Mac mini faster?
Click to expand...

Unless you regularly run apps with extreme resource needs, it's doubtful you'll see much improvement by adding RAM beyond 16GB. The SSD would definitely make a noticeable improvement, however. Which size will be mostly determined by your budget and what files you absolutely have to have on your internal drive. My guess, based on how little you've used your 1TB drive, is you could probably work well with a 256GB SSD, with the remainder of your files on an external drive.
 
SSD will do the trick, could not believe how much quicker my mini became when I did it.

Now have a 250gb SSD as boot drive, and the original 500gb drive for storage.

The Samsung drives score well and are very popular. I used a Sandisk Extreme I had kicking around in my old Dell laptop. Much better served in the mini.
 
Most of your HDD is free space so for ultimate speed add 2 x SSDs in a RAID 0 config and put the HDD in a USB 3.0 enclosure for backup.

2 x 256Gb SSDs + a flex cable is all that's needed. You could even boot from the existing HDD from the enclosure to clone it back.
 
I wound up going with a 250GB SSD for the primary (OS, applications), and a 1TB hybrid drive for all of my iTunes media. I used the iFixIt dual hard drive kit. Was relatively easy to install.
 
Suture said:
I wound up going with a 250GB SSD for the primary (OS, applications), and a 1TB hybrid drive for all of my iTunes media. I used the iFixIt dual hard drive kit. Was relatively easy to install.
Click to expand...

Awesome! Did you keep them as two drives? Or did you create them into a fusion?
 
Didn't bother with Fusion, everything is running pretty fast. Probably didn't need to spend the extra on the 1TB drive for a hybrid (vs a traditional 7200 RPM spinner), but figured I'd get it just in case. Whole dual install took maybe 20 minutes? Hardest part was this one stupid L-shaped bracket thing that kept coming undone.
 
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