Upgraded mac mini HDD to SSD and now it's the speed it should have been

Good work Ben!

I’ve souped up more than a dozen 2010, 2011 and 2012 Mac Mini’s over the years. Early on, I could not afford SSD’s, so I settled for 2.5” 7200rpm drives. Kind of like pulling the 289 out of early Mustang and dropping in a 351c. Today SSD’s are cheap and sub-light speed, does not even come close to light speed.

The processor is the same as before, yes. But the responsiveness and speed of the overall machine (not just the processor/video card) is dramatically improved.

I know you believe this, but without hard data (such as recording the before/after times) you are relying on your perception of a old and slow Mac compared to a old and slow Mac you want to believe is a lot faster. Think of it in terms of being on the highway, then suddenly entering a 25 MPH zone. In your perception you are traveling a lot slower, but in reality it is merely 30 MPH slower than being on the highway. The reverse is equally true - if you have never traveled above 25 MPH then 55 seems like light speed in your perception.

I find it hard to understand why more people don't change the drive now: usually the advice is the bulk up the RAM.

My advice is always to replace the Mac. There is too much performance to be gained in 5 years to justify only replacing the hard drive. Looking at the GeekBench scores for the latest MacMinis shows them topping out at 28,094. The fastest of the late 2014 MacMinis pegs out at 7,834. That's roughly 3.5 times slower than the 2018 models. An SSD is not going to close that performance gap in any appreciable way that justifies the cost.

So I wanted to point out a few flaws in this posting:

1. No, it won't be like having a new machine. The processor/video card will still turn in the same Cinebench/GeekBench numbers as before. You *perceive* the Mini is faster, but the processor still handles the same workload as before. The addition of a SSD will not turn a MacBook 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo into a 4K editing station.
2. This information isn't more widespread as you still have an old, slow Mac with an arguably faster hard drive.
3. Apple sold the Mini with a 'slow' hard drive to hit a price point. How quickly we forget SSDs used to be multi-thousand dollar items. I purchased one of the first available 500GB SSDs from Crucial, and paid over a thousand dollars for it. A 1 TB drive - as I recall - was not even available at the time, but if it were the price would have at least doubled.

the SSD hd gives a big bump in the price tag compared to a 5400rpm hd

but you can suggest they phase out the magnetic hd's using their feedback channel

Feedback - Mac mini - Apple

Check the new 2018 Minis, Rudgear, they are all SSD based.