Based on That-Guy's great instructions and encouragement, I took the plunge and installed an OCZ Vertex 4 SSD in my mid-2011 Mac Mini today. The OCZ was on sale through Amazon for $389 on my birthday last week, so I figured what the hell?
I did a little bit different installation since the data doubler kits were backordered through OWC. I put the OCZ into an external USB 2.0 enclosure and used CCC to clone the drive overnight. Next I just replaced the factory HDD with the OCZ according to the instructions on OWC's website. The only thing that was a bit tricky for me was getting the OCZ properly mounted into grommets in the front of the mini's case. Without a second drive to support the OCZ, I had to do a bit of fishing around to line up the holes with the screws. I also did not have to remove or disconnect the power supply - there was plenty of room to remove and install the drive.
The mini took a bit longer to startup for the first time (no doubt trying to figure out what the heck happened to the HDD it was expecting to see), but it got into Mountain Lion without incident or going into recovery mode. I installed TRIM and did a reboot. Wow. The increase in performance is INCREDIBLE. I'm getting 450 MB/s read and 420 MB/s write.
Now I think i'll ask for a 1TB drive and a data doubler for Xmas.
I did a little bit different installation since the data doubler kits were backordered through OWC. I put the OCZ into an external USB 2.0 enclosure and used CCC to clone the drive overnight. Next I just replaced the factory HDD with the OCZ according to the instructions on OWC's website. The only thing that was a bit tricky for me was getting the OCZ properly mounted into grommets in the front of the mini's case. Without a second drive to support the OCZ, I had to do a bit of fishing around to line up the holes with the screws. I also did not have to remove or disconnect the power supply - there was plenty of room to remove and install the drive.
The mini took a bit longer to startup for the first time (no doubt trying to figure out what the heck happened to the HDD it was expecting to see), but it got into Mountain Lion without incident or going into recovery mode. I installed TRIM and did a reboot. Wow. The increase in performance is INCREDIBLE. I'm getting 450 MB/s read and 420 MB/s write.
Now I think i'll ask for a 1TB drive and a data doubler for Xmas.