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I have a 2.3 GHz quad core, 16 GB 1600 MHz RAM late 2012 Mac Mini. It has a 1 TB SATA drive which I know is limiting it.

I'm really looking into upgrading this Mac without putting a whole lot of money into this 6 year old machine. Boot ups are super slow. Loading Photos app takes minutes. I'd just love a refresh. I don't do Logic Pro or anything super taxing, so I am focusing on upgrading the drive. My questions are. 1) Should I go with fully upgrading to a 1 TB SSD?

It seems like the best way, but it's expensive. 2) Use the data doubler and upgrade to a 500 GB while keeping my 1 TB available for storage.

Can I load certain files and applications on the SSD to make it go faster while storing a large bulk of the data on the SATA drive? Or will that limit me? I'm just not certain how the two drives will behave together.

Any suggestions? And do you also have suggestions for good SSDs? Read mixed reviews about the Crucials and Samsungs, but who knows. Fastest, easiest way -- without prying open the Mini -- buy an external USB3 SSD drive, and plug it in. Set it up to become 'the external boot drive'.

Put the OS, apps, and basic accounts on it. Speeds will jump up to about 4-4.5x those of the internal drive.

You should see reads in the 420+mbps range and writes 300-350mbps (depending on drive and size). You'll get about 80-85% of the speed you would see from an internally-installed SATA SSD, but without any of the trouble you might run into doing the installation. I'd suggest either a Samsung t3 or t5, or something like this: Eventually, you're going to move on to another Mac. When that time comes, having an external drive makes it easy to just unplug the drive from the Mini, and plug it into your new Mac for additional fast storage.

I've been booting and running my own 2012 i7 Mini this way for going on six years now, from the day I first took it out of the box. Ran great then, still runs great today. I have a 2012 2.6 ghz quad mini with 16gb and an original 256gb internal Apple SSD. It's a very fast machine, boots in about 15 seconds from the internal SSD. I use this machine solely for audio and video editing and it runs Logic and Final Cut Pro very well. I upgraded it with a 1tb external Samsung T3 SSD awhile ago and it's great, still very fast. About the only difference I notice between the original internal SSD and the external SSD is that it takes about 30 seconds to boot from the external (no big deal).

I kept the original Mountain Lion operating system on the original drive, so I could use all my expensive legacy software and the external SSD has Sierra (which is what I use 95% of the time). So your machine can definitely do a lot better. I like the idea of an exernal SSD for a lot of reasons - especially since it doesn't involve opening up a 6 year old computer where there's a fair chance of damaging something. FWIW, this is how the original internal Apple SSD performs And this is my external SSD. The internal is faster, but IMO it's not worth the risk of opening up the Mini.

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Fastest, easiest way -- without prying open the Mini -- buy an external USB3 SSD drive, and plug it in. Set it up to become 'the external boot drive'. Put the OS, apps, and basic accounts on it. Speeds will jump up to about 4-4.5x those of the internal drive. You should see reads in the 420+mbps range and writes 300-350mbps (depending on drive and size). You'll get about 80-85% of the speed you would see from an internally-installed SATA SSD, but without any of the trouble you might run into doing the installation. I'd suggest either a Samsung t3 or t5, or something like this: Eventually, you're going to move on to another Mac.

When that time comes, having an external drive makes it easy to just unplug the drive from the Mini, and plug it into your new Mac for additional fast storage. I've been booting and running my own 2012 i7 Mini this way for going on six years now, from the day I first took it out of the box.

Ran great then, still runs great today. I don't use the Photos app so I can't really say what the bottleneck is. But the stock drives on a new Mini clock around 100MB/sec when new - this may degrade with age. So just do the math. Loading a large file from the internal hard drive will take about 4x longer than a fast external USB SSD. A cheap external may be slower than the T3 in my example however.