A lifelong consumer electronics expert and gourmet, he now focuses on the changing ways people work, play, eat, and travel. His Spanish restaurant Aro Bar de Tapas won Best New Restaurant (Opened 2015-2016), Best Charcuterie, Best Craft Cocktails, and Best Desserts awards.

If your Mac is more than a few years old, you can almost certainly upgrade the hard drive. Unfortunately, if you’ve got a newer model, you’re probably out of luck.

OWC's step-by-step video of how to install a hard drive in the Apple Mac mini 2010 with Model ID: Macmini4,1. Compatible 2.5' SATA Hard Drives & Solid State. Il Mio Problema. Quickly exceeding the storage space on the old drive. La Mia Riparazione. Overall, the repair went well and is up and running. Had some problems a screw back in the hole for the antenna plate (step 8 of 'Mac Mini Mid 2010 Hard Drive Replacement' guide) possibly because of Step 15 not aligning the chassis properly.

I also just found on keeping Time Machine working when you change the Hard Drive. If you don’t have a Time Machine backup now is a great time to start! You can use your old Internal Drive as a backup drive. Great post, but I’m still having issues getting my computer to boot from the SSD. I bought a Samsung EVO 850 SSD (and enclosure) and connected it via USB 3.0, as opposed to opening up my mac mini 2014.

The Mac mini Mid 2010 is also noted for being the most energy-efficient desktop computer, using less than 10 watts of power when running at idle.

The I installed in my iMac is 5 times faster than the 1TB hard disk it replaced and has no moving parts, so it’s tiny, silent and cooler-running. It also has a five-year warranty and a longer expected lifespan than most hard drives; if you’re willing to pay more, the has a ten-year warranty that eclipses all but the most expensive enterprise-class desktop hard disks. Internal or External?

And restoring your personal data at hand. Upgrading the Hard Drive If you have an older model (pre-Mid 2010) and paid attention to the above video, you’ll have noticed that when you removed the optical drive from the rest of the system and placed it aside, the other side of that hunk of electronics holds the hard drive.

While the 2010 Mac mini limits you to FireWire 800 or USB 2.0 — probably not worth the effort of adding an external SSD — the 2011 model has a Thunderbolt port, and the 2012 version has USB 3.0 ports, making external SSDs easier to add. If USB 3.0 is an option, go with. Thunderbolt-only users can consider Elgato’s professional-class, which just dropped in price: OWC offers them for.

The restoring process will take hours, but you’ll come back to a fresh installation of OS X with everything pretty much as it was left on your old drive. If you want to go the more complex route, you can order this, connect it to your iMac and SSD before opening up the machine, and run or to transfer the old drive’s contents to the new drive. This will let you start using your iMac right away after the drive is swapped, without waiting hours for Time Machine, and for better or worse pretty much guarantees that every one of your files (and potentially plenty of cruft) will be exactly where it was before. Should you want to swap an optical drive for an SSD, or add an SSD to a Mac Pro’s empty drive bay, nothing needs to be done to prep software beforehand.