My mid-2011 Mac mini had slowed down . path down . Starting with Mavericks , the mini would finally bog down down after a number of days between restarts , and expect a force restart or manual one .
It took several second to power up and start loading apps , and then around 20 minutes , if not retentive , to be in full responsive — this despite 16 GB of RAM . My late-2011 MacBook Air , with just 4 GB , restarts and is usable within a twosome minutes . What gives ?
I had to figure it out , because I increasingly ground myself wasting time and waiting .
No pressure, honestly
You ’d think someone write the Mac 911 column would have plentifulness of idea , and yes , I did . Restarting would often free up 20 to 40 GB of platter space on the miniskirt ’s home 500 GB hard drive . ( Seethis Mac 911 columnfor more about caches . ) But the Mac was n’t any faster after a restart than before .
I used WhatSize ( which I alsoreviewed ) to free up almost 90 GB in unneeded files , which seems to help a little . There was clearly something to do with impermanent files and available disk storage slowing thing down .
WhatSize get me quickly settle and delete 90 GB of files I did n’t need . That helped , but did n’t fasten the problem all the way .
Using Activity Monitor , and in the Terminal , thetopcommand , I could see I was often running up against the limit of physical retentivity , but the Mac did n’t seem to be under “ memory pressure , ” which would get a spate of disk activeness . During the sluggish post - restart , pre - usable phase , neither memory nor disk entrepot was an issue .
Mavericks addedmemory compression , a room to maximize physically installed RAM that gave Modern living to my MacBook Air . But neither that nor trade , in which surd disk outer space is used to salt away static element of remembering , was cause problems as well , according to Activity Monitor .
And I did n’t have an easy path to the obvious root : swapping in an SSD , a substantial - state drive that could be orders of magnitude faster than the 5400 rev surd drive in the miniskirt . The last few years of mini models have hard drives put away aside like an matinee idol in the Temple of Doom . iFixitranks the swop - outas “ moderate , ” even though it has 20 step in each direction . I usually do n’t funk at take apart a Mac , but this had too many chance to go unseasonable .
Once you crack start the Mac mini , you ’re still 19 steps from swapping out the tough effort . Not as easy as plug in an external SSD .
But it is , of track , possible to use an SSD in an international inclosure . I went that route , and solved the slowdowns .
The many choices for external SSD
I come at this problem not require to buy a new Mac yet , and also want to keep the toll to about $ 300 , while getting something I would reuse with a new computer or for portable storage later on . To get a comparable mini with the same amount of entrepot and remembering would cost at least $ 700 , and that ’s without a built - to - purchase order Fusion campaign ( HDD / SSD jazz group ) , but a veritable hard effort . ( There ’s no SSD option from Apple . )
My manakin of Mac minihas four USB 2.0 ports , one FireWire 800 porthole , and Thunderbolt . An SSD connected over Thunderbolt seemed like overkill , and I was already powering one presentation with the built - in HDMI port and another via DisplayPort using the Thunderbolt connection . So any Thunderbolt drive would call for to have two ports to support passthrough , and I did n’t come up any in my cost range . ( Amazon sells theThunderbolt / USB 3.0 Transcend 512 GB SSD international drivefor about $ 370 , including both kind of cable . )
The SSD I pick out has FireWire 800 to provide a degraded - enough connectedness to my Mac miniskirt , plus USB 3.0 , so I can use it with the next Mac I buy .
USB 2.0 is too ho-hum , and I miss USB 3.0 . That made it an well-situated option to go with FireWire 800 , which maxes out at a in the altogether pace of 800 Mb per second ( Mbps ) . I wound up with theOWC Mercury Elite Pro miniskirt 480 GB model , which has FireWire 800 plus USB 2.0/3.0 , giving me a path forrad to any new Mac with USB 3.0 . It ’s presently $ 297 , let in USB 3.0 and FireWire 800 cables . ( There are cheaper options for the same capacitance with a exclusive interface . )
When the drive arrived , I had to switch some FireWire cables , as I already have another OWC drive tie for championship . I useCrashPlanfor incremental and archival backups , andSuperDuperfor nightly “ smart ” clone update , but I turn toCarbon Copy Clonerfor making my migration due to a special feature it possesses .
Here ’s how I proceeded :
Initialize the external SSD . To use OS X Recovery and other advanced feature film , you need to utilize the GUID Partition Table data formatting . ( Seethis tutorial . )
Using Carbon Copy Cloner , I copied my active startup driveway in the Mac mini to the extraneous SSD . I take to keep work during part of the operation , but it fortuitously did n’t slow the system down much . The copying rate was more or less 40 GB per time of day , which is middling slow , but not unexpected .
Because I was using my computer during the ringer , I know I missed some modify data point . Both SuperDuper and CCC have an incremental clone operation , where only changed files are copy . After the first clone was fill out , I cease all active platform and shut down several services , and did another straits . This one took only about 40 minutes to finish .
I used CCC ’s Recovery HD feature , which lets me copy the retrieval partition on an survive disk and then restore it to a new partition after a bootable arrangement is installed .
Carbon Copy Cloner can create the same Recovery partition that my Mac ’s internal drive has .
I renamed the startup volume to a different name , and renamed the external SSD exactly as the startup disk was in the beginning discover . Then in the Startup Disk preference pane , I set the SSD as the boot volume and restarted .
After the restart , I had to reconnect to a few service , like Dropbox , which cleverly note differences in a calculator ’s setup to be sure that someone is n’t highjack your system . I also had to reconnect the CrashPlan backup , by “ adopting ” a backup from “ another computer , ” a proficiency it uses for a new car or a newfangled startup identity . Everything else work without any bother .
The difference is startling
I immediately saw an enormous difference , as if I ’d swapped the estimator rather than the startup disk . The FireWire 800 busbar is distinctly fast enough to make the difference for the kind of indication and writing that was occurring . re-start the first prison term , in which type O X was distinctly engaged in some cleanup and hive up , take about six min . Subsequent restarts are in the two- to three - minute compass .
The oddest thing I ’ve discovered a few mean solar day in is that I ’m seeing less utilisation of storage . The uttermost tops out at just above 11 GB , when it used to go about 15 GB or more . This is incomprehensible and counter - nonrational . Why would faster storage result in more fresh random-access memory ?
After I was indisputable I had a unobjectionable backup of my iron heel cause , I changed SuperDuper to backup the SSD to the Mac mini ’s internal drive . In a pinch , should the SSD or its enclosure fail , I can reboot off that internal drive with zero fuss — though I ’d be back to the old , slow f number until I got the SSD fixed .
When I ’m quick to upgrade my Mac next , whether to an iMac with Retina 5 K or a next - contemporaries mini , I ’ve catch a portable solution : I can buy a Mac with a cheap hard drive or unification parkway , and leverage this purchase over USB 3.0 to bulge out as zippy as possible .
