Installing an SSD in a Late 2009 A1283 Mac Mini

Nimitz 2nd HDD caddy for Mac Mini

I recently bought an SSD for my Mac Mini. Being a late 2009 model with a 2.26GHz Core2Duo, 4Gb of RAM and a 500GB HDD there wasn’t much else I could upgrade that would improve the performance. The optical drive malfunctions and doesn’t get used so I could remove that and swap it for an SSD.

Opening the case of the Mac Mini required the usual care of ramming two metal “pry tools” (paint scrapers) into the sides of the case, and the multitude of minute screws were an equal faff to extract and replace, but beyond that the upgrade was very easy. Much easier than doing a similar thing to an 2010 model iMac.

In my Mac Mini the SSD has replaced the 2.5 inch hard disk as the boot drive with OSX, /Applications, /Developer and my home directory. The original 2.5 inch hard disk contains large things such as my iTunes music folder (but not the iTunes library files) and downloads from the Internet. Due to the reliability of SSDs still being somewhat unknown I also have a 1 terabyte USB attached hard disk which is used with TimeMachine.

To install the 2.5 inch hard disk required me to buy an adapter because the SATA connector for the optical drive in the Mac Mini uses a mini/laptop style SATA connector which does not fit a standard HDD connector. After searching the Internet for a while I found a “Nimitz 2nd HDD caddy” for sale on eBay from user Nimitz** who was selling similar items for other Apple computers and also had one for my Mac. It was considerably cheaper than similar products available.

My Mac Mini now boots in less than ten seconds, and launching applications is almost instantaneous.

To restore my system I first used Disk Utility to “restore” the contents of the Snow Leopard DVD onto my TimeMachine drive – this was done a few months ago and was not part of the upgrade process. This effectively gave me a bootable TimeMachine disk from which I could run the Snow Leopard installer which detected the TimeMachine backup and automatically restored my machine to its original state. After which I moved some folders off the SSD onto the HDD, replacing them with symbolic links (which must be done through Terminal, not using aliases in Finder) and rebooted to ensure everything was functioning correctly. The entire process from first opening the case to having a working machine took less than three hours, with the majority of the time spent either trying to get fiddly black screws into tiny black screwholes or waiting for data to copy off a USB hard disk.