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2011 Mac Mini HDD Failed - use USB instead?

LeeBailey

LeeBailey

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 16, 2020
3
0
I have an old Mac Mini (A1347) that appears to have experienced a HDD failure (folder with question mark on boot, drive doesn't show during recovery or fresh install etc).

This machine is a bit of a 'spare', rather than a daily use thing - but I would like to make use of it for a Windows install, if I can. I've considered replacing the drive, however I'm wondering whether I could instead simply use a USB drive - either standard external USB, or a flash ('thumb') drive. Pricing is about the same, but an external one gives me the option to use it for something else if the Mini has any other problems now or further down the line.

Thumb drive would be preferable for the sake of portability, but I'm completely out of the loop on whether this can be done?
 
I wouldn't recommend a thumb drive…they're too unreliable.

It'll work OK with an external USB drive (preferably SSD) but the USB ports are the old, slow USB 2 protocol so not good compared to having one inside with the SATA speed (6 Gb/s).

iFixit has a guide for changing out the internal drive. I've done it and it's not too hard.

Which model do you have? Two of them had the AMD Radeon HD 6630M GPU which is known to fail (it happened a year or so after on the one I mentioned). If it's not the Mac mini "Core i5" 2.3 (Mid-2011) with Intel HD Graphics 3000 I definitely wouldn't bother opening it up for the upgrade.
 
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You can boot and run from USB just fine. I doubt you’ll find it slow considering that your previous hard drive was mechanical and slow. But as stated above, don’t use a thumb drive. Buy a cheap USB SSD.
 
Thanks both!

I did look at the iFixit guide. While I'm not totally against the idea the level of use the machine will get, the fact it probably doesn't have a huge amount of life left in it anyway etc, I'm thinking USB is just going to be 'easier' and at least leave me with an external drive I can repurpose in future if needed.
 
Another thing to consider is that if you're planning to use it as a Windows machine as you mentioned in your first post, Windows is really weird about installing to and booting from external drives. You're far better off in nearly any way replacing the internal drive with a cheap internal SSD. If the mini dies in a year or two, no worries, take the SSD out and put it in an enclosure. Bam, instant external SSD that you can use on anything :)
 
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I'd also replace the internal dead drive since SATA is so much faster than USB and honestly replacing the internal drive would be the proper way to do it even if it takes more time. I say this especially because you want to run Windows on your Mini and in my experience Windows does not run nicely off external drives and can even be troublesome to run with other internal solutions (e.g. PCIe to SATA card in a Mac Pro).
 
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Another option would be an external Thunderbolt 1 or 2 SSD, eg. the Transcend JetDrive 825 or 855. These use a PCIe interface and are very fast but I don’t know if Windows can boot from them.
 
Last edited:
Spock said:
Doesn't the 2011 have Thunderbolt? Might look into an external TB 1 drive, that should be plenty fast.
Click to expand...

It has one port, which must also be used for the display, meaning you need some kind of splitter there. For TB1, that's likely to be expensive.
 
Replacing the drive quite easy in the 2011 Mac mini, I installed a dual disk kit without too much trouble.
 
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You should definitely replace the dead hard drive with a SATA SSD. Do you know how cheap they are nowadays, and how much faster than hard drives they are?

Just don’t bother buying a new hard drive.
 
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