Swapping out the Mac mini (mid-2011) stock drive with an SSD

Il Mio Problema

The mini wasn't broken, but the stock hard drive was of the slow 5400 rpm variety, which made the computer itself very slow when running OS X 10.11. So I wanted to find out if I could replace its hard drive with a speedier SSD, and ifixit had the tools and instructions I needed.

La Mia Riparazione

The repair went fine. The step-by-step instructions were complete and accurate. They took all the guesswork out of how to disassemble the unit to get to the drive bay. There was a little bit of work getting the new SSD to sit in the mount, but that's down to Apple not making it easy. Other than that, it was pretty straightforward. I swapped the drives, put the mini back together, turned it on and cloned the old drive to the new. The drive swap took about 30 minutes, and the cloning took about six hours.

Il Mio Consiglio

I might add one more step at the very end of the drive replacement instructions that shows removing the SATA adapter from the drive itself, which is needed for connecting the new SSD. But I knew about this detail from swapping out laptop drives in older PowerBooks, so that wasn't a mystery for me. Someone doing this task the first time might not know about this detail.