
I usually don’t quail at disassembling a Mac, but this had too many chances to go wrong. IFixit as “moderate,” even though it has 20 steps in each direction. The last few years of mini models have hard drives locked away like an idol in the Temple of Doom. And I didn’t have an easy path to the obvious solution: swapping in an SSD, a solid-state drive that could be orders of magnitude faster than the 5400 rpm hard drive in the mini. Mavericks added, a way to maximize physically installed RAM that gave new life to my MacBook Air.īut neither that nor swap, in which hard disk space is used to store inactive elements of memory, was causing problems as well, according to Activity Monitor. During the slow post-restart, pre-usable phase, neither memory nor disk storage was an issue. Using Activity Monitor, and in the Terminal, the top command, I could see I was often running up against the limits of physical memory, but the Mac didn’t seem to be under “memory pressure,” which would cause a lot of disk activity. That helped, but didn't fix the problem all the way. WhatSize let me quickly locate and delete 90GB of files I didn't need. There was clearly something to do with temporary files and available disk storage slowing things down. I used WhatSize (which I also ) to free up almost 90GB in unneeded files, which seems to help a little. (See for more about caches.) But the Mac wasn’t any faster after a restart than before. Restarting would often free up 20 to 40GB of disk space on the mini’s internal 500GB hard drive. No pressure, honestly You’d think someone writing would have plenty of ideas, and yes, I did. I had to figure it out, because I increasingly found myself wasting time and waiting. My late-2011 MacBook Air, with just 4GB, restarts and is available within a couple minutes. It took several minutes to power up and start loading apps, and then around 20 minutes, if not longer, to be fully responsive-this despite 16GB of RAM. Starting with Mavericks, the mini would eventually bog down after a number of days between restarts, and require a force restart or manual one. How to illegally download microsoft office for mac.

Get everything you need to upgrade your 2012 Mac mini SSD for a total system performance and capacity boost.
