Inside each hard drive is a mechanism that looks remarkably like a record player. Different materials, upgrades in mechanisms and capabilities, much better electronics inside, but mechanically similar enough that there’s no mistaking it. The one I disassembled was bigger, slower, noisier, and less reliable than the ones used in computers today, but with the cover off, it looked just the same as a modern one. Hard drives are faster, smaller, and use less energy than ever before, but they’re still essentially unchanged in basic concept from the first refrigerator-sized storage devices that IBM developed for its room-sized computers more than half a century ago.Īlmost 30 years ago I worked for a hard drive company, and one of the first things I did when I started was to take apart a drive to understand how it worked. In the process, Apple sacrifices a lot of performance.Ģ1st-century computing saddled with 20th-century storage It’s little wonder that Apple continues to use them for low-cost, low-margin systems like the Mac mini. The price of SSDs has dropped precipitously in the past few years, but hard drives remain the champion of low cost per gigabyte – a 500 GB HDD replacement for a Mac mini costs you less than $50 at retail, while a 500 GB SSD might cost three times that amount. That’s because Apple continues to offer that model with a spinning hard disk drive, and that murders performance. I never expected it to win any races, but what kills the Mac mini compared to the MacBook Air isn’t the CPU or the RAM. It comes with a 1.4 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Regardless, I strongly recommend considering it – not just for a 2014 Mac mini, but for any older Mac you’d like to pep up.Īt $499, the base-model Mac mini is Apple’s least-expensive Mac, half the price of the MacBook Air but not nearly as peppy.
If you’re using one of these models and you’re looking for a good way to bump up the performance, an SSD is, quite frankly, one of the only things you can do (unlike older Mac minis, Apple soldered the RAM in place). But I know crucial have the info on their website, and I also know that it’s still a pretty cheap upgrade.I finally got around to upgrading my 2014 Mac mini with a solid state drive (SSD). I also don’t know what I used without taking it apart, and I can’t do that at the moment. Anyone who bought one back at release time really won the lottery in terms of a long supported and usable platform. As old as they are, I still love my old Mac Minis, even compared to my new M1. HDDs really don’t allow the platform to show itself in a good light at all. Response times and latency reduction makes such a huge contribution to the performance of an SSD - it’s not all about transfer speed. You would get better performance from the internal SATA connector, but anything you can do get the OS running from something other than a HDD is a worthwhile exercise, so an SSD over USB is absolutely an improvement. It usually takes me a few dozen attempts, during which time I question my sanity :) And I have an uncanny ability to make disaster of re-fitting the WiFi antenna plate.
Pulling out the board and then messing around with those tiny connectors is no fun. But it’s definitely a fiddly process, and I can’t say I enjoyed it. I’ve replaced the drives in my old Mac Minis many, many times.
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