Upgrading a very slow Mac Mini 2014 4gb

[a11an]

Would you nice lot be able to offer me some advice?

I have a late 2014 Mac Mini (A1347) with 4GB soldered ram running Big Sur with the original 5400rpm HD.

It's a little underpowered, but I only use it to build ios releases for my mobile games, all dev is done on a different box. This worked fine a few years ago, but now, as you can imagine, it's painfully slow to even just load IntelliJ IDEA.

So I understand the upgrade options are a little limited and was looking at replacing the HD with an SSD. After researching the forums I can see there is the possibility of installing an additional mini SSD via the PCIe connector.

Would I be correct in thinking this is my best option? Is this even possible? If so, would I require a PCIe Connector flex adapter cable (21-00010-A)? With this, can I install any M2 SSD? I was looking at picking up a 256GB NVMe Samsung PM961 or Intel Pro 760p.

Thanks for reading.

 

[glenthompson]

If you don’t want to open the box to install the SSD, you could make a bootable external SSD and run from it. Thunderbolt is fastest connection but USB3 is much faster than your spinning drive. The 4gb is also a limiting factor but not much you can do about that.

 

[Fishrrman]

Unless there's no way you can afford another Mac, I wouldn't put much $$$ into this one.

That 4gb "limit" of RAM is going to handicap it forever...

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Swapping the HDD for a 256GB 2.5" SSD is the most economical upgrade for your Mac mini. The SSD can be re-used in other machine when you finally ditch the Mac mini.