best external ssd for mac mini late 2012

The kit works great, I love having two hard drives inside the Mac mini. I used the Data Doubler kit on my 2012 mini, although only to install a second internal hard drive, not an SSD. The 2012 mini should see dramatic overall speed improvements from installing an SSD, especially because the stock 5400RPM is a slow hard drive to begin with. As a photo editing station with current Photoshop-like applications, RAM should be upgraded to 8GB or more. If you are using this more and more as a main photo editing computer, both the RAM and the hard drive are inadequate.Īs a server, 4GB RAM should be OK. I have the System, applications, and my user directory other than the image files and libraries on the SSD. I just added an external SSD (Samsung 256 GB) to my 2012 quad-core mini (8 GB RAM) and the change has been dramatic. Or should I look to just increase the ram? Any ideas are welcome. In the end it all depends on how much $$$ you want to spend. Depending on what is installed (I'm guessing 2 x 2GB) you could go for a 2 x 8GB upgrade.

So you could upgrade to an external SSD for storage too.įor the RAM you only have two slots in the Mini and it is recommended that you put identical modules in each slot. The external disk is kind of a bottleneck to me since the 5400 rpm drive is much slower than the theoretical troughput of USB3. The processor should be OK for a while to come if you don't need top performance. I also have an external usb3 WD hd attached, but I believe it's only 5400 as well. My mini has a 2.5 ghz i5 chip, 4gb ram, and a 5400 rpm hdd inside. That should boost the performance quite a bit since your Mini has SATA III.Īnyway, rather than try and deduce from a lot of online articles, I thought I'd ask more knowledgable folk that might have done this. I think the best course of action is to install an internal SSD in place of the spinning disk for the OS. That said, would it just be better to update to a newer model? I'm not sure as of this writing if minis even have ssd drives or if they still have the spinning versions. I also have a later iMac and I'll admit, I'm jaded when I compare experiences. I began using it mainly as a media center/server but find I'm often also using it as a 'real' computer. I'd like to get an opinion on whether adding an external ssd to my late 2012 mac mini would show a great improvement in speed.

Best external ssd for mac mini late 2012