You should be able to find the Apple service manual for your mini, which would give you a bit different idea about how to do this.
Search for "mac_mini_mid_2011.pdf"
Well; there’s no turning back now. ?
Everything is disassembled except what I’m hoping is “Macintosh HD2” in the “Upper” location, which appears to be the lower location, as seen here:
After reading through comments on your iFixit link; Step 37 says “To minimize the amount of work necessary when adding an SSD to be used as your primary drive, we recommend installing the SSD like we did in this guide and leaving the stock platter drive in its original bottom position (closest to the antenna plate).”,
However, many comments seem to have an issue with the positioning of the new SSD in the “Upper” location, advise doing the opposite of what the step says, and go as far as to suggest the “Upper” location for the new SSD noted in the step is “backwards/wrong info” that should be “corrected” and/or “updated”.
I've also seen some complaints about being unable to boot from the new SSD as well as OS X trying to handle the 2 drives as one Fusion drive (and somehow fails at that), whatever that means. ?♂️
Now, I understand most are probably adding a drive to a previously empty space on a mini NOT replacing a crippled 2nd drive that came installed on a mini server.
So just to confirm; in which location do you recommend installing the new MX 100 SSD and how do I ensure that I’ll be able to boot from it?
