Anyone put a 2tb drive in their Mac Mini 2014?

[Risco]

I underestimated how much space I needed and only have 150gb left out of 1TB. I see there is a Samsung M9T, which I was also thinking of getting for my PS4.

Videos make it look a bit painful to upgrade the drive, what with having to remove the motherboard etc. So has anyone done this?

 

[ahendarman]

Why not using a USB 3 external drive. It'll be as fast.

 

[paulrbeers]

I underestimated how much space I needed and only have 150gb left out of 1TB. I see there is a Samsung M9T, which I was also thinking of getting for my PS4.

Videos make it look a bit painful to upgrade the drive, what with having to remove the motherboard etc. So has anyone done this?

I agree with the poster below. Usb 3.0 is faster than any mechanical drive on the market. There is no need to tear apart your mini to add basic storage.

 

[rigormortis]

i disagree. you should never use a usb enclosure as your primary hard disk or primary storage. the reason is , when the hard drive starts to fail, it has no way of notifying the operating system of its impending doom, because s.m.a.r.t. technology is not compatible with external hard disks, and cannot be read or determined

the other thing going against usb 3 is that hybrid hard disks need 5 v @ 700 ma operating current and they don't have the brains to ask the ata bridge board for that extra current that usb 3 can give them

 

[Risco]

Why not using a USB 3 external drive. It'll be as fast.

I have one, I got the Mac Mini purely for serving my iTunes on demand. This is then constantly backed up to my Time Capsule seamlessly along with my Macbook Pro.

Therefore I am specifically only looking for opinions on upgrading the mini's drive.

 

[paulrbeers]

I have one, I got the Mac Mini purely for serving my iTunes on demand. This is then constantly backed up to my Time Capsule seamlessly along with my Macbook Pro.

Therefore I am specifically only looking for opinions on upgrading the mini's drive.

You can time machine any drive. Doesn't have to just be the OS drive.

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i disagree. you should never use a usb enclosure as your primary hard disk or primary storage. the reason is , when the hard drive starts to fail, it has no way of notifying the operating system of its impending doom, because s.m.a.r.t. technology is not compatible with external hard disks, and cannot be read or determined

the other thing going against usb 3 is that hybrid hard disks need 5 v @ 700 ma operating current and they don't have the brains to ask the ata bridge board for that extra current that usb 3 can give them

Why would you use a hybrid drive for a data drive? And further, you should have a backup regardless if you have it as an internal or not. The only way SMART helps is if you catch it. Further, I've had drives fail that weren't registering any SMART issues. Why anyone would rely on that as a means to protect their data is just asinine.

 

[Glenn.eu]

I placed a Samsung M9T 2TB HDD in my 2014 Mac Mini with flash pcie on board to make a fusion drive.
You will need to buy the HDD cable (can buy it on ifixit, it's the same cable used to add a HDD in the 2012 model (you will be missing a small cap to put over the cable but the cable snaps into place)), if you are good with handling small screws and electronics you should be ok. It's not like taking apart the good old PC's 🙂
It was my first Mac that i opened up but it turned out ok, got everything up and working now (might have lost my recovery partition but i'm not worried about that since you can use internet recovery on new macs and i got a time machine backup now).

EDIT:
Sorry i just see that you already got a smaller HDD installed, that makes it easier! (y)

Good luck 😉

 

[Risco]

I placed a Samsung M9T 2TB HDD in my 2014 Mac Mini with flash pcie on board to make a fusion drive.
You will need to buy the HDD cable (can buy it on ifixit, it's the same cable used to add a HDD in the 2012 model (you will be missing a small cap to put over the cable but the cable snaps into place)), if you are good with handling small screws and electronics you should be ok. It's not like taking apart the good old PC's 🙂
It was my first Mac that i opened up but it turned out ok, got everything up and working now (might have lost my recovery partition but i'm not worried about that since you can use internet recovery on new macs and i got a time machine backup now).

EDIT:
Sorry i just see that you already got a smaller HDD installed, that makes it easier! (y)

Good luck 😉

This is just what I am looking to do. Can you explain a little more detail how you went about setting up the Fusion drive and what size PCI-E and make / model did you use?

 

[Glenn.eu]

This is just what I am looking to do. Can you explain a little more detail how you went about setting up the Fusion drive and what size PCI-E and make / model did you use?

I just googled: how to create a fusion drive
and i ended up using this site:
http://benscheirman.com/2013/11/creating-a-fusion-drive/
So i first installed the mac mini, so i have a working os, then used carbon copy cloner to copy the working os from the mac mini to a usb stick

I bought my gear from ifixit, data kit (for cable) and a tool kit with the new T6 security driver,...
Use a few youtube video's to assist with the teardown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SaVDTq353A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C-a71PSPgs
(you will be missing a small cap + screw to put over the new cable but the cable seems to snap into place firmly enough)

After that i wanted to see if the drive was working so i booted from the usb and formatted the hdd to see if i got a working (Samsung M9T) 2TB working drive. (worked fine)
Then i followed the command line instructions and all from this site:
http://benscheirman.com/2013/11/creating-a-fusion-drive/
But i got errors that he could not identify disk02 or something, after a while i gave up and formatted my pcie flash drive (what do i have to loose) and when i did that disk utility asked if i wanted to restore the drive, so i clicked yes and disk utility created the fusion set by itself! Victoryyyyy!
Then i tried installing the OS again through internet recovery, that also failed, then i booted from my cloned usb stick and cloned the usb stick to the 3tb fusion set and after that everything worked perfect! I just lost my recovery partition but that's ok for me.

I know not everything went as expected but it's now working as planned (y)

Good luck 😉

 

[Fishrrman]

[[ you should never use a usb enclosure as your primary hard disk or primary storage. the reason is , when the hard drive starts to fail, it has no way of notifying the operating system of its impending doom, because s.m.a.r.t. technology is not compatible with external hard disks, and cannot be read or determined ]]

Nonsense.

I've been booting and running my late-2012 Mini for almost TWO YEARS using an SSD sitting in a USB3/SATA docking station.

Boots quickly, runs smoothly.
No problems at all -- NONE whatsoever.

I do keep it backed up -- actually, I back up to the factory-installed INTERNAL drive, which is also partitioned to manage specific data (partition for music, partition for photos, partition for general storage, etc.

I also keep -that- backed up to other external drives, including an off-site backup.

So long as one keeps a recent backup, SMART matters little at all. It can serve as a potential warning system, but ONLY if one chooses to run an app that monitors it. I seriously doubt the majority of Mac home-users pay much attention to ANY app that monitors SMART (such as Disk Utility) -until- they are already having problems. By that time, they no longer need SMART to tell them they've got a problem.

 

[26139]

Can you confirm?

I'm looking to buy a 2014 Mac Mini, but only the low-end one because it's my media center.

I know the RAM isn't upgradeable, but from what this thread is telling me, the hard drive is, yes?

I'm looking to replace the 500gig HD with a 256SSD and don't want to buy the mid-range model.

All doable, yes? I've opened and replaced either ram or an hd/ssd in every Mac except the latest MP, so complexity isn't an issue (especially with videos available online).

But I'm good in my assumption, yes?

 

[paulrbeers]

I'm looking to buy a 2014 Mac Mini, but only the low-end one because it's my media center.

I know the RAM isn't upgradeable, but from what this thread is telling me, the hard drive is, yes?

I'm looking to replace the 500gig HD with a 256SSD and don't want to buy the mid-range model.

All doable, yes? I've opened and replaced either ram or an hd/ssd in every Mac except the latest MP, so complexity isn't an issue (especially with videos available online).

But I'm good in my assumption, yes?

I replaced the 1tb drive in my 2014 mid-Mini with a 250gb Samsung 840 evo. Just followed the ifixit guide. It's the toughest mini to date to replace the hard drive, but with a little but if care, a little bit of time, and the requisite security t6 screwdriver, it is wasn't a problem.

 

[Intell]

i disagree. you should never use a usb enclosure as your primary hard disk or primary storage. the reason is , when the hard drive starts to fail, it has no way of notifying the operating system of its impending doom, because s.m.a.r.t. technology is not compatible with external hard disks, and cannot be read or determined

SMART over USB has been around for years, it's called SAT-SMART. It isn't in OS X be default, but you can easily add to to 10.4 or higher with the proper driver: https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver It works very well, is seemless, and is the exact same as getting the SMART from an internal drive. Don't forget, SMART isn't always accurate. Often a drive will fail, but SMART says the drive is fine and passes all tests.