
So it appears that as Patrick stated, youre already getting the fastest speeds from the drive that you can get with your Mini. This is handy when it is not totally clear from the video what some of the connectors look like.How to save as on macbook air. Your Mac Mini 2012 has neither but any USB connection is probably going to result in fast speeds. However, the pictures can be zoomed, showing some really nice closeups of the steps. They don't show much of the reassembly, and also don't talk about leaving the original SSD or HDD in and adding a second SSD into the spare bay. Despite the good news about the RAM, the CPU and SSD are soldered to the logic board, as are many ports, so this isnt a truly modular Mac mini.
The instructions here from IFIXIT have great pictures to illustrate some of the steps. He does every step you need to do, and is very good at clearly communicating the process. One of the many reasons this video is so good, is that the author is specifically addressing how to add a second SSD, versus replacing your existing HDD or SSD. I recommend watching it in totality once before you even start to take apart your Mini. I played this video on another computer, and just started and stopped it as needed. In conjunction with the above steps, this video is fantastic and shows you step by step how to disassemble, add the SSD, and reassemble the Mac Mini. Once I had restored and verified that I was booting from the new SSD, I validated that things were working correctly, and then erased the original SSD for more fresh storage. The only deviation I encountered was to do an Erase of the new SSD as part of step 6, before doing the restore of the whole original SSD from Time Machine, onto the new SSD. Follow the steps here, specifically the post from Mike Diglio. I had spent some time researching the best way to go about the installation, and here is what I followed, and recommend if you would also like to install a second SSD into your Mac Mini. That macOS will be the version of macOS that is backed up on the Time Machine or the macOS that created the recovery partition.