How to tell which drive in 2012 Mac Mini is the system drive?

[Soundhound]

I just got a 2012 mac mini which has two drives in it and I'm going to replace one of them with an SSD for the system drive. I saw a few posts which say to look in System info under Sata and the drives will be listed as upper and lower. Unfortunately on my system when I look under Sata is shows just one drive, and under storage is shows the other.

Is there a way to tell which drive is upper and which is lower? And should the new ssd I put in for the system be in the slot that shows up under sata, or under storage?

thanks!

 

[AppleNewton]

when you have the mini opened the orientation of the drives will be reversed. so the one under the wifi-anntena is lower and the one next to it is upper.
Lower is generally considered "Bay 1" and upper is considered "Bay 2"
Apple will generally ship a fusion drive as a SSD inBay 1/Lower and HDD in Bay 2/Lower

The drive should show up under both SATA and Storage, this should have no effect. external drives and time machine backup drives may also appear in Storage

 

[jbarley]

I just got a 2012 mac mini which has two drives in it and I'm going to replace one of them with an SSD for the system drive. I saw a few posts which say to look in System info under Sata and the drives will be listed as upper and lower. Unfortunately on my system when I look under Sata is shows just one drive, and under storage is shows the other.

Is there a way to tell which drive is upper and which is lower? And should the new ssd I put in for the system be in the slot that shows up under sata, or under storage?

thanks!

Have you tried looking at "Disk Utility", it will list both drives and show you the install locations.

 

[Miat]

Disk Utility doesn't always list that info. I have go to the SATA/SATA Express tab in the System Information app to get it.

I'm running Mavericks (10.9.5), if that is relevant.

 

[Celerondon]

Lower is generally considered "Bay 1" and upper is considered "Bay 2"
Apple will generally ship a fusion drive as a SSD inBay 1/Lower and HDD in Bay 2/Lower

Did you mean to type, (Apple will generally ship a fusion drive as a SSD inBay 1/Lower and HDD in Bay 2/Upper)?