Speeding Up a 1.4GHz Mac mini

[Tony Crooks]

Hi,

I probably made a mistake buying a refurb 2014 model 1.4GHz Mac mini earlier in the year but its predecessor, a 2011 model, was worrying me with persistent overheating, fans continuously at full blast. Plus I didn’t fancy spending a lot of money on what is essentially a home server sitting under our main TV which is used as the monitor for when we need family FaceTime, etc.

The 1.4GHz mimi is as slow as molasses and I know I could have dismantled it to insert an SSD but I’m done with this from experience with its predecessor. But the grindingly slow performance increasingly irritated me.

Not so long ago I read about someone using an external SSD as a boot drive and intrigued I looked up the latest prices. Actually quite cheap, about £85 for a 500GB external SSD. Having read around this some more, noting such issues as needing to reformat the drive, and the apparent inability to format a USB drive as an APFS - not true - but not obvious with Apple’s Disk Utility, I plumped for a 960GB external SSD from Integral, which cost me just under £100.

A dinky credit card sized object with a very, very short USB3 cable and not at the bleeding edge of SSD performance. Actually setting it up for APFS and then cloning my system disk was very straightforward. And, wow, 1.4GHz mini performance transformed. Apps in the Dock open with one bounce. Web pages load very rapidly. FaceTime stability much improved (although what that has to do with disk performance I’m not sure). Just what I’d hoped for.

I installed the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app to see what read/write speeds were being achieved. Both in the 380MB per sec area - quite some improvement over the tardy performance of the 5400rpm hard disk Apple sticks in the mini.

According to Integral the life of the SSD is estimated to be 10 years of general use - probably enough for this system.

So, if you have a Mac with USB3, or better, ports and no internal SSD, or do not want to take apart your system then an external SSD could give your system a bit of a boost. 

[Jason P. Davies]

Might have been me who you’re thinking of. I did this a few years ago - even over usb it is so much faster, isn’t it! Glad you got it going...

Thanks,

    -Jason

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