Recommendations for Rebuild

TPhill110 · June 7, 2022

Budget (including currency): Performance over money

Country: United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Maybe video editing, coding for sure.

Other details

Im looking to upgrade the ssd and the ram in my (late 2012 Mac mini). I can’t decide between the (OWC Mercrury Electra), (OWC Mercury Electra Extreme Pro), (Bx500 Crucial). A guy in the Apple forum said that when he ran tests with the Bx500. I’m just going to quote it “Crucial MX500 series the write cache fills up after about 45 seconds of non-stop sequential writes and will slow down from about 450MB/s to 250MB/s and stabilize there”. OWC claims that the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro has

No slow downs - Maintains read/write speeds exceeding 500MB/s over the entire drive capacity.

As for the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro it’s write speeds are 110MB/s and it’s read is 534MB/s.

I’m still confused on how I’d go about transferring the Mac operating system onto the new drive. Would buying an external enclosure help or would that be pointless? I heard you could do it from a usb drive but is it even practical? I also heard something about cloning which I think I might do if I buy the external enclosure. Any recommendations or even video links would be greatly appreciated.

As for the ram I was thinking about either going with 8gb or 16gb. I heard Crucial, Corsair, and OWC are good brands for ram when it comes to macs. I was thinking about going with 16gb of crucial. What are your recommendations. I’m trying to get speed over anything.

maartendc · June 7, 2022

7 hours ago, TPhill110 said:

Budget (including currency): Performance over money

Country: United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Maybe video editing, coding for sure.

Other details

Im looking to upgrade the ssd and the ram in my (late 2012 Mac mini). I can’t decide between the (OWC Mercrury Electra), (OWC Mercury Electra Extreme Pro), (Bx500 Crucial). A guy in the Apple forum said that when he ran tests with the Bx500. I’m just going to quote it “Crucial MX500 series the write cache fills up after about 45 seconds of non-stop sequential writes and will slow down from about 450MB/s to 250MB/s and stabilize there”. OWC claims that the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro has

No slow downs - Maintains read/write speeds exceeding 500MB/s over the entire drive capacity.

As for the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro it’s write speeds are 110MB/s and it’s read is 534MB/s.

I’m still confused on how I’d go about transferring the Mac operating system onto the new drive. Would buying an external enclosure help or would that be pointless? I heard you could do it from a usb drive but is it even practical? I also heard something about cloning which I think I might do if I buy the external enclosure. Any recommendations or even video links would be greatly appreciated.

As for the ram I was thinking about either going with 8gb or 16gb. I heard Crucial, Corsair, and OWC are good brands for ram when it comes to macs. I was thinking about going with 16gb of crucial. What are your recommendations. I’m trying to get speed over anything.

BX500 is an entry level drive, that's all. You'd probably never notice the difference with a more expensive drive in day-to-day usage.

You could install MacOS onto the newly upgraded SSD from a bootable USB installer with the MacOS installer on it. After you boot from USB, you just install MacOS onto the new drive. Follow these steps to make one: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

Cloning the drive would probably be the easiest option if you wish to migrate the whole system with all files, apps etc.. You would need an external USB enclosure to put your new drive into, and a Mac software tool that allows cloning a drive. After the cloning, you just swap the drives and it should work.

The RAM, apparently according to this article https://www.imore.com/how-upgrade-2012-mac-mini it takes 1600MHz DDR3 SODIMM modules. 16GB is the max the Mac mini supports. I remember upgrading my wife's Macbook Pro from 2008 with Crucial RAM. But as long as it is 1600Mhz DDR3 SODIMM, it should work regardless of brand though. Crucial is a reliable brand but I would go for the cheapest, RAM is RAM.

Good luck.