With the new hard drive firmly stuck in place, it’s time to put the covers back on and take it for a test drive! This was so easy! Disk Utility doesn’t see the new drive Luckily, the foam on the bottom of my adapter included adhesive (green arrow).

Looking at the blue arrows, there is a hole to screw the SSD adapter to the case, but the hole in my adapter didn’t line up with it without some bending. Inside the case, you will see the PCIe plug as pointed out in the photo below by red arrows. Carefully lift the edge of the metal cover that is furthest away from the WIFI antennae away from the case (the antennae wire is still attached). Installing the SSD assembly in the Mini is as simple as popping off the round black plastic bottom and removing six Torx screws. This is what it looks like after I installed the hard drive that I chose based on its read/write speed vs price ratio (Crucial P1): The model number of my Mini is A1347, and it say right there “this adapter only fit 2014 A1347…”. I started out with this adapter that I found on my local version of eBay: Adding an M.2, on the other hand, was accomplished in just a few steps. One of the reasons I chose to add an M.2 drive instead of replacing the spinny 2.5″ disk with an SSD, is that doing the latter seemed like a real pain on this model of Mini. The first sign that I was going to run into trouble was how smooth the hardware installation went. How can an i5 processor run at 1.4ghz?.But if you have found yourself in possession of some components that aren’t playing nice together, read on. If your planning on doing a project like this but haven’t bought any hardware yet, please skip to my rant at the end of the article for some shopping advice. Note that had I done a little more research before starting this adventure, I could have avoided a bunch of headaches. So started a long, misguided journey to carry out one of the few upgrades available for this particular model of the Mini - adding a PCIe SSD. Unfortunately, after upgrading it to the latest version of macOS, it was almost too sluggish to use. Recently, I found out some of my web pages didn’t look so great on Apple devices, so I picked up a late 2014 Mac Mini so I could have a device running Safari natively.

Mac mini 2014 ssd upgrade