Upgrading Mac Mini 2012 HD?

andrewliu said:

I'm planning on getting the new Mac Mini, but I'm curious, because of warranty concerns, I won't plan on upgrading my HD until after warranty ends. I wanted to get the 1 TB Fusion Drive, but if I want to upgrade my Hard Drive eventually to SSD, can I have the TB Fusion Drive as my backup (still in my mac mini), and still install a new SSD as second HD? Or would I need to buy the basic Mac Mini in order to upgrade the HD?

Thanks

Click to expand...

The Apple "Fusion Drive" is actually 2 physical disk drives ... one a 128GB SSD and one a 1TB hard disk. These are "joined" within OS X to function together as a single logical drive providing both speed and large capacity at a low price. Both are standard format laptop 2.5" drives and occupy both available slots in the Mac Mini.

If you get a hard disk only model, you will not have the cable and some small mounting parts for the second drive, but you can purchase an upgrade kit from OWC and iFixit which will supply those parts and some required tools to perform the upgrade. The upgrade is not difficult, but some of the tiny connectors are very fragile and easily damaged if you are not careful.

You will probably enjoy the Fusion drive now if you are to get it, rather than waiting a year to upgrade due to warranty concerns.

The 1TB Fusion drive is really two drives. One 128GB SSD, and one 1TB 5400RPM hard drive "Fused" together with software. You can't add a third internal hard drive or SSD, but you could replace either one with a different hard drive or SSD.


hfg beat me to it.

andrewliu said:

Oh thanks for the help guys!

So, if I do get the fusion drive, I can take out the 1tb hard drive, but keep the SSD that it comes with, and add another SSD? So I can have 2 SSD running?

Is there going to be performace problems? Or is one of them just used as a backup?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Yes, you can do that. First you will have to "break" the Fusion drive with 2 commands in Terminal (backup all your data first) which will reformat the drives as separate disks. Then replace the hard disk with your new SSD, then restore your data from your backup. You can boot from either drive and manage them separately, or your can RAID them as JBOD which will concatenate them into a single large logical drive which is the sum of the capacities of each drive.

You may find, however, that the Fusion drive provides all the performance you need.

My only complaint is that they should offer a larger SSD as part of the Fusion package and allow you to divide it up so you can put BootCamp Windows on the SSD rather than the Hard Disk as they do now. I have configured my 2011 Mini in this way with a 256GB SSD and 1TB hard disk and a DIY Fusion such that my Windows installation is on 1/2 of the SSD along with OS X Fusion for the speed advantage.

-howard