- Pcie Ssd Installation Kit For Mac Mini Late 2014 Specifications
- Pcie Ssd Installation Kit For Mac Mini Late 2014 Ram Upgrade
- Pcie Ssd Installation Kit For Mac Mini Late 2014 Specs
Mac Mini Late 2014 PCIe SSD connector flex cable/cradle – Part 076-00040. Personally I have the iFixit kit from the 2012 Mac mini second HDD kit but I still required an extra tool that I was able to pick up relatively cheaply to be able to actually get into the Mac mini. I just wanted to add that based largely on the very helpful information in this thread, I had a very positive experience adding an NVMe SSD to my stock late 2014 Mac mini. The only parts I needed were: The 'XT-XINTE PCI-E x4 x2 M.2 NGFF M-Key NVME AHCI SSD Converter Card Adapter' part mentioned. In order to enable Fusion Drive Technology on a Mac Mini (late 2014) we install a PCIe Express Flash SSD (we used actually one from a Mac Book Pro Retina 201.
I finally got around to upgrading my 2014 Mac mini with a solid state drive (SSD). The difference is like night and day. 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). Regardless, I strongly recommend considering it – not just for a 2014 Mac mini, but for any older Mac you’d like to pep up.
At $499, the base-model Mac mini is Apple’s least-expensive Mac, half the price of the MacBook Air but not nearly as peppy. It comes with a 1.4 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM. 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’s the storage. That’s because Apple continues to offer that model with a spinning hard disk drive, and that murders performance.
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. It’s little wonder that Apple continues to use them for low-cost, low-margin systems like the Mac mini. In the process, Apple sacrifices a lot of performance.
21st-century computing saddled with 20th-century storage
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.
Almost 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. 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. Different materials, upgrades in mechanisms and capabilities, much better electronics inside, but mechanically similar enough that there’s no mistaking it.
Inside each hard drive is a mechanism that looks remarkably like a record player. Your data is written to a disc of magnetic material that spins on a central motor. A tiny arm outfitted with sensitive electronics reads and writes data sequentially to the disc surface by changing microscopic parts of the surface’s magnetic polarity.
Why SSDs make the difference
macOS is not bad at navigating slower-speed CPUs and limited RAM overhead. It does so by pushing off a lot of work to “virtual memory,” which pages information out to storage when not in active physical memory. That’s why my poor Mac mini slowed to a crawl whenever I asked it to do something. Convert iso to vhd. Click on an app icon in the Dock, for example, and I’d lose track of how many “bounces” I’d watch until it finally opened. Trying to do anything was equally painful – lots of spinning beach balls while the Mac waited for data. Starting up and shutting down took a long time too, as macOS handled all that virtual memory housekeeping.
Using a Mac with limited memory, slow CPU and a spinning hard drive requires infinite patience. More often than not, I’d start to do something, wander off until the Mac mini was ready, then get back to it.
SSDs comprise memory chips with no moving parts. They’re very sophisticated memory chips, connected to equally complex controller circuits which manage the flow of data hither and yon. But they’re not saddled with spinning motors, disk arms, or anything else that moves. The flow of data is governed by basic physics – how fast electricity moves across circuits, the bandwidth of the controller chips and the peripheral interface.
As a result, SSDs are very fast. They’re also very quiet, since there are no moving parts. They’re more reliable than hard drives too, since jostling them doesn’t risk damaging moving components inside. They can also be produced in much smaller sizes, though SSD makers also make them in housing designed to work as a plug-and-play Serial ATA (SATA)-equipped replacements for hard drives. I used one such drive, from Mac-friendly upgrade company Other World Computing.
Replacing the hard drive with an SSD removes that bottleneck. Now the Mac mini performs more like a MacBook Air (albeit still slower than one). Two or three bounces and apps open. I can open several apps at once without suffering the indignity of endless beach balls. It’s really brightened things up. I haven’t benchmarked it, but I really don’t need to – it was totally worth the effort.
Doing the upgrade
This is now the fourth Mac mini model I’ve worked on, and Apple has changed them each time. Sometimes the changes were subtle, sometimes dramatic. This was by far the most challenging Mac mini I’ve disassembled. But in the end, it went smoothly and without incident. I’m not going to go through the process step-by-step, but I thought I’d offer a few impressions and suggestions based on my experience. If you’re interested, just Google it or hit YouTube for help. iFixit’s step-by-step teardowns and repair guides are indispensable. (I found the Verge’s teardown instructions, written by Nick Statt, which I won’t link to here, to be needlessly hysterical and overdramatic.)
The first order of business was to clone the Mac mini’s hard drive to the SSD. I did so by putting the SSD in an external USB drive sled I keep around for such occasions – they’re a dime a dozen from vendors like NewEgg. This wasn’t strictly necessary – I could have used the Mac mini’s Internet Restore mode to download a fresh copy of macOS from Apple’s servers and install it, then restore from my Time Machine backup. But I wanted to save myself time. Cloning creates a bootable bit-for-bit copy of the existing hard drive. I used Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper to handle that.
The first thing that tripped me up when I popped off the Mac mini’s bottom case cover: The 2014 model uses T6 security screws on the bottom. T6 security screws differ from standard Torx screws with an indentation in their center that keeps a regular Torx bit from fitting. You’ll need a special T6 security bit to remove it. Again, iFixit saved my bacon here – their toolkit included everything I needed, except for a motherboard removal tool (read on for details).
Here’s a tip: As you’re going along, use your smartphone to take photos of all the screws you remove, or place them on a mat in roughly the same place as you took them out. That’ll make it easier for you during the reassembly to figure out which screws go where.
To replace the hard drive on a 2014 Mac mini, you have to disassemble the Mac mini case, carefully disconnect the Wi-Fi antenna, disassemble the fan, remove the main logic board and the power supply. Most of that is pretty straightforward, albeit time consuming, often frustrating work because of the small space and tiny components. I budged an entire morning to do the upgrade, but I was doing a lot of other stuff while I worked.
Most of the guides I saw mention a Mac mini motherboard removal tool, which is inserted into two holes on the motherboard to help you slide it out of the back of the case. iFixit offers their own version for $5, and I’ve seen videos of people improvising their own using a pair of small screwdrivers or even using a straightened wire coathanger. It was unnecessary in my experience – just pushing the board out the back with my thumbs was enough to get it out. But forewarned is forearmed. If you want to make sure you have everything you need, make sure to have that on-hand too.
Once those items are removed, the last thing to do is to remove the hard drive tray. Four screws on either side of the drive hold it in place, and the SATA data cable is glued down to the drive’s controller board and affixed using a small piece of black tape which keeps the SATA cable in place. Both the tape and the SATA cable can be peeled off and put back in place once you’ve replaced the drive with the SSD. One last note – the hard drive Apple included in my Mac mini had two little foam pieces glued to it to reduce drive vibration. I didn’t bother to put those back on the SSD, since SSDs don’t vibrate, and because the SSD I used was taller than the 7mm drive, manufactured by HGST, that Apple installed. I haven’t seen any negative results.
Following the steps in reverse order I was able to close up the Mac mini and get it started without any issues. It booted right up and has been operating fine ever since.
In conclusion
This isn’t an upgrade for the faint-hearted, and I really wouldn’t recommend it for a first-time either. But if you have some experiencing taking Apple gear apart, or even if you just have the will to do it, it’s well worth the time. Set aside a few hours to do and make sure you have the right parts – get familiar with some online tutorials, then get cracking!
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Recently, I found out some of my web pages didn’t look so great on Apple devices, so I picked up a late 2014 Mac Mini so I could have a device running Safari natively. Unfortunately, after upgrading it to the latest version of macOS, it was almost too sluggish to use. So started a long, misguided journey to carry out one of the few upgrades available for this particular model of the Mini — adding a PCIe SSD.
Note that had I done a little more research before starting this adventure, I could have avoided a bunch of headaches. If your planning on doing a project like this but haven’t bought any hardware yet, please skip to my rant at the end of the article for some shopping advice. But if you have found yourself in possession of some components that aren’t playing nice together, read on.
Table of Contents
- Making a new partition
Hardware
The first sign that I was going to run into trouble was how smooth the hardware installation went. One of the reasons I chose to add an M.2 drive instead of replacing the spinny 2.5″ disk with an SSD, is that doing the latter seemed like a real pain on this model of Mini. Adding an M.2, on the other hand, was accomplished in just a few steps. I started out with this adapter that I found on my local version of eBay:
Things were looking good. The model number of my Mini is A1347, and it say[s] right there “this adapter only fit 2014 A1347…”. This is what it looks like after I installed the hard drive that I chose based on its read/write speed vs price ratio (Crucial P1):
Installing the SSD assembly in the Mini is as simple as popping off the round black plastic bottom and removing six Torx screws. Carefully lift the edge of the metal cover that is furthest away from the WIFI antennae away from the case (the antennae wire is still attached).
Inside the case, you will see the PCIe plug as pointed out in the photo below by red arrows. Looking at the blue arrows, there is a hole to screw the SSD adapter to the case, but the hole in my adapter didn’t line up with it without some bending. Luckily, the foam on the bottom of my adapter included adhesive (green arrow).
With the new hard drive firmly stuck in place, it’s time to put the covers back on and take it for a test drive! This was so easy!
Disk Utility doesn’t see the new drive
To see the new hard drive, click the Launchpad icon in your dock, and look for Disk Utility in the Other folder. Then click the view button in the upper-left-hand corner, and click devices.
If you see your new drive, congratulations! Your hard drive was probably one of the ones that are fully compatible with macOS. If you don’t see the drive, as it was in my case, don’t give up hope! Formatting the drive might get your Mini to see the new disk. All you need is a PC with a real operating system and an empty M.2 slot or an external M.2 enclosure. After you have found a way to connect the drive to a PC, you can follow the Windows instructions below or jump to instructions for Linux.
Windows
I followed a guide that I found here.
There are several Windows apps out there that can format drives to an Apple file system, but I prefer to use the all-powerful and automatically installed Diskpart. To open Diskpart, first, open a command prompt by pressing Windows+R. Then open the command prompt with:
Press Enter. In the command prompt enter:
A dialog will pop up asking if you want this program to make changes to your computer. Red faction guerrilla pc mods. Say yes, then click yes and Diskpart will open in a new window. First, you need to find out the disk number of the new drive. This can be accomplished by entering:
You should see something like the following.
This next step is very important. If you don’t choose wisely, you might accidentally format the wrong disk, and lose your data, your OS, or maybe your will to live. If you aren’t sure which drive to use, you can eject the new drive, and run the previous command again to see which one disappeared. Once you are are sure you know which disk is the one you want to format it, select it with the following command. REPLACE THE # WITH THE CORRECT DISK NUMBER!
Sorry for yelling, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve blindly cut and paste commands from a tutorial and wondering why I get errors when I was supposed to replace bits of the command with my own info. Anyways, moving on. Now clean the disk and make a new partition with the following commands.
I’ve used Diskpart more than a few times in the past, but this was the first time I had seen the ‘id=af’ parameter. I Googled around a bit and didn’t find a clear explanation, except that whatever follows the id tag lays out block sizes, etc. I assume ‘af’ stands for Apple filesystem. Moving on. If there isn’t any smoke coming out of the back of your computer, check to see that the partition appears with the following.
And the partition should be listed.
Finally, select the partition, mark it active, and exit Diskpart.
At this point, you can eject the SSD or power off your PC and remove the drive, and move on to the next step.
Linux
Usually, we carry out tasks with a shiny GUI in Windows, and terminal commands in Linux. However, for this project, I recommend the opposite. But don’t worry, the program of choice for making an Apple filesystem disk, GParted, isn’t included with every distro of Linux, so you might still be able to fire up that terminal! I’m running Ubuntu, and thus use the APT package manager. If you are using a different package manager, please change the following to match your system. First, if you haven’t checked for updates lately:
Then install GParted and the package that allows it to use the HFS+ format. HFS+ is not the latest Apple file system, but your Mini will recognize it and it is the most recent one that can be used by GParted. Run the following:
Then launch GParted from your application launcher or with the following command:
Yes, you must run it as sudo. That’s because if you make a wrong move you can really mess your system up. As long as you get the next step right, though, you won’t have any problems. In the drop-down menu at the top-right corner of GParted, select the disk you want to format.
Hopefully, you will be able to judge which one it is by its capacity and since this a new drive, it will show up as unallocated. It usually is the last one, but if you are not sure, eject the new drive and unplug it to make sure. Next, from the Device menu, select Create Partition Table.
Select mac as the partition table type. This is the point where you won’t be able to recover your system if you selected the incorrect hard drive, so cross your fingers and click Apply.
The thing about accidentally deleting your system partition is that your OS is loaded in RAM, and you can keep going for a while thinking everything is OK. I’m sure that didn’t happen to you. The next step is to create a new partition:
Select HFS+:
![Pcie Ssd Installation Kit For Mac Mini Late 2014 Pcie Ssd Installation Kit For Mac Mini Late 2014](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/DGQAAOSwKfpdiWbt/s-l300.jpg)
And apply changes by clicking:
And that’s it! After a short wait, your SSD is ready to be re-installed in your Mini.
What now?
Hopefully, your new disk now shows up in Disk Utility. However, as indicated by the warning message about your Mini not being able to read the disk you may or may not have gotten, the disk is not ready to go yet.
I do have screenshots for this part, but I decided that because macOS is such an intuitive, user-friendly OS, I would save everyone’s bandwidth. All you need to do is open Disk Utility, right-click on the new hard drive (it should be a long string of numbers and letters, anything but ‘APPLE HDD’), and select Erase. Give the volume a new name and click Erase. After that finishes, you can right-click on the new volume and select Covert to APFS.
From here, the drive is ready to use as you see fit. If you want it to speed up your user experience though, you will have to move macOS to the new drive. The way to accomplish this will vary from user to user. In my case, I had just started using this machine, so a fresh install via USB installer was convenient. If you want to migrate an established install, there a restore option might be more suitable.
How can an i5 processor run at 1.4ghz?
This Mac Mini was definitely an impulse buy for me. As I said at the top of the page, I needed something that could run Safari to view some web pages I had been working on, and not wanting to trust a simulator, I ran straight to Shopee (an Asian version of eBay) and bought the cheapest Mini I could find. All of the listings showed the CPU as being an i5, but none of them said which model of i5, but I said to myself, “Self, it’s an i5! It will have plenty of horsepower for what I want it for! Two cores minimum, running somewhere between 2.5ghz and 3.5ghz.”
The other thing I noticed is that the 2012 model of the Mini was selling for a slightly higher price. I didn’t notice it too hard to save thirty bucks though, and went ahead and ordered the 2014 model. After I upgraded it to Catalina (the latest version of Xcode wouldn’t run on High Sierra) and started a simulation of an iPhone, I noticed that everything was a little sluggish.
So, I opened a terminal checked the system resources with the following command:
Pcie Ssd Installation Kit For Mac Mini Late 2014 Specifications
This is what I saw:
Pcie Ssd Installation Kit For Mac Mini Late 2014 Ram Upgrade
The first thing I saw was all the stuck processes. I had never seen that before, not even on a Pi Zero. The second thing was the high load average. This i5 is a dual-core, so ideally I’d like to see a load of 2 or less. Weirdly, the CPU was barely doing work. It seems the bottleneck was being caused by a shortage of memory. Unfortunately, this RAM is not user-upgradable on this model of Mini. So, my only hope was to make the virtual memory faster. That’s when I decided to try and put an SSD in this cute little beast.
Pcie Ssd Installation Kit For Mac Mini Late 2014 Specs
The 2012 model is fully upgradable! And it has a 2.5ghz i5! Sure, it is a third-generation chip instead of the 2014 model’s fourth-generation, but that is a pretty big difference in clock speed. But the ability as a user to add more RAM is the reason the 2012 model is still the winner for a cheap, second-hand Mac Mini.