Thanks to Amazon Prime the Mac Mini and the ram and data doubler kit to install the solid state hard drive had arrived early. Everything I used to do this will be linked at the bottom of this post.
I needed to do the following before the Mac Mini would be working correctly.
- Migrate data
- Install 16 gigs of ram
- Install SSD
- Format hard drives
- Install all my music production software
Data Migration
After about an hour most things were migrated that I wanted to transfer. Everything for the most part went as planned minus other than almost all of my applications would not transfer over. I got an error saying that they are broken or not compatible. Weird. Oh well starting with a fresh hard drive is never a bad thing, and almost preferred as I didn’t use 80% of the applications.
Installing Ram and SSD
The ram was very simple and straightforward turn the bottom of the Mac Mini and you can get to the ram. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials to watch if you are like me a visual / hands on person.
In an about 5 minutes I had it installed and ready to rock. Immediately there was a performance improvement from opening applications to how many applications that I could run. Lastly I noticed that the graphics card memory went from 512 MB to 768 MB.
Installing the second hard drive proved to be a little harder as you have to take apart the entire Mac Mini. Luckily the kit that I bought also had instructions on what to do, I also had a YouTube video on my laptop just in case. Without the data doubler kit there would be no way I could install the SSD.
Overall I spent about 2 hours to get everything done. I went very slow and took caution to do everything correctly without breaking anything. Even going slow, I managed to do some damage to their cable. Luckily everything still works minus the infrared controller and I lost the power to the front light. Needless to say be careful!
Once everything was put back together the Mac Mini turned back on it started to fly. Before installing the SSD I used Carbon Copy Cloner and cloned the hard drive to save time and make things easier once it was installed. I simply had to go into settings and tell my Mac Mini which hard drive to boot from.
Once I did this I rebooted and was back up to the log in screen in 15-20 seconds start to finish. I did a few more reboots (this is me being paranoid) and it booted just as fast with no issues. I knew then everything would be fine. I then reformatted the terabyte hard drive that came with the Mac
Mini for storage. Finally I installed Pro Tools and other software I wanted on the Mac Mini
So far so good everything is running very well look for benchmark and performance testing very soon!
Software used to transfer data
Hardware
- Data Doubler Kit
- 16 Gigs of ram used
- Intel 520 Series SSD
- External Hard drive (Having one will make the process go a little smoother)
YouTube videos to help aid the installation process
Till next time.
Jamie