Added a second drive to my Mac Mini

mickrich

mickrich

Member
Aug 2, 2007
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Pretty straightforward job.
The "Data Doubler" kit came with very good instructions.
The only tricky bit was lining up the screws on the drive with where it attaches to the airport "grill".
I added a Seagate SSHD which is a 1TB drive with 8GB of flash.
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/laptop-solid-state-hybrid-drive/
Once installed I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the original drive to the new SSHD then once I had confirmed it was all working, I wiped the original internal drive.
The SSHD monitors your usage and moves your most used applications to the flash part so the mini now boots in a few seconds and finder is amazingly fast.
The drive has learned that I use safari, mail and logic the most and all of these load extremely quickly and are super snappy.

Now I have internal drives for OS and audio, just like I had on my old mac pro.
I have disconnected my external drives and will just plug them in for backup or archiving from the internal audio drive.

The i7 Mac Mini with this extra drive is great.
I highly recommend adding an extra drive to anyone with a Mac Mini.
 
Of course, this voids any warranty the device might have unless done by an Apple-certified professional. But definitely ups the ante on the Mini.

I was going to ask if you weren't worried about losing yours since it's an i7 Mac Mini, but I just realized mine's over an year old as well by now! Thanks for reminding me, that means I can add a drive into it myself now without worrying about the warranty.
 
I did this myself, man what a difference the SSD really makes as a system drive !
It should be illegal to ship new computers without a SSD, and the best part is that it could turn a piece of shit computer into something decent just by replacing one part. The dual drive rack was fairly easy to install and I haven't regret making that choice for a second ! A big heads up for every Mac Mini owners out there !
 
I really need to do this, I went with a Mac Mini last year after my Mac Pro died. Even though it has a faster processor, it isn't anywhere near as peppy as my Mac Pro was. I was thinking of adding more ram first, anyone know if this is a good idea or would an SSD be smarter to do first? I've had a lot of issues lately with Pro-Tools stalling out when I first hit play when using a lot of plugins, even though the processor is nowhere close to maxxed out. It either tells me to increase the buffer, which is already as high as it goes, or I just get the spinning wheel for a minute.
 
Been looking into doing this myself actually, thinking about doing dual SSD's so I've got one for the OS and one for audio, still got an external for my East West samples though.
 
Christian WUFU said:
Same. Mine crashed my old MBP within a few months of installing it. Though plenty of people have had success with their products. I guess we're just unlucky
Click to expand...

We're not unlucky, there's an history of failures with seagate, their hd's are the worst on the market, especially the mechanic ones.
WD is the way to go for "old school" 7200 rpm
For ssd: Samsung or Intel, their cheap lines are reliable and fast!
 
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