To use OS X Recovery and other advanced features, you need to use the GUID Partition Table format. I use CrashPlan for incremental and archival backups, and SuperDuper for nightly “smart” clone updates, but I turned to Carbon Copy Cloner for making my migration due to a special feature it possesses. When the drive arrived, I had to swap some FireWire cables, as I already have another OWC drive attached for backups. (There are cheaper options for the same capacity with a single interface.) It’s currently $297, including USB 3.0 and FireWire 800 cables. I wound up with the OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini 480GB model, which has FireWire 800 plus USB 2.0/3.0, giving me a path forward to any new Mac with USB 3.0. That made it an easy choice to go with FireWire 800, which maxes out at a raw rate of 800 megabits per second (Mbps). USB 2.0 is too slow, and I lacked USB 3.0.

The SSD I chose has FireWire 800 to provide a fast-enough connection to my Mac mini, plus USB 3.0, so I can use it with the next Mac I buy. (Amazon sells the Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 Transcend 512GB SSD external drive for about $370, including both kinds of cables.) So any Thunderbolt drive would need to have two ports to support passthrough, and I didn’t find any in my price range. An SSD connected over Thunderbolt seemed like overkill, and I was already powering one display with the built-in HDMI port and another via DisplayPort using the Thunderbolt connection. My model of Mac mini has four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, and Thunderbolt. I usually don’t quail at disassembling a Mac, but this had too many chances to go wrong. iFixit ranks the swap-out 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. But 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.Īnd 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 memory compression, a way to maximize physically installed RAM that gave new life to my MacBook Air. 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 reviewed) to free up almost 90GB in unneeded files, which seems to help a little.

External ssd for mac book air