Way OT: Old Mac Mini Upgrades

[MaraudingWalrus]

Just won a govdeals auction from the surplus property department at my university for a mid 2010 Mac Mini. Grabbing it Tuesday morning.

It only has 2GB of RAM, I'll likely bump that up the the maximum allowable 8GB for that device (apparently OWC/macsales says 16GB is fine, so might do that instead).

Anybody still using one of these regularly? It looks like I should be able to get all the way up to High Sierra on it.


I really only intend it to be a media hub once I cut cords fully - the smart TV I use is old an losing native netflix support Dec31, and streaming of sports (either "legitimately" through a family member's cable login or from an illicit stream on say /r/nbastreams, /r/peloton etc) tends to be more stable on the original device than when screen mirroring or chromecasting.

Anyone here upgraded RAM on one of theirs? RAM is easy on these, hard drive requires some digging to get to, and not sure an SSD would do much for my intended use.

I don't think I want to do the optical drive delete/replace with memory setup as there's like a 5% chance of having a DVD or CD to use sometime...

[ultraman6970]

It is posible to swap the video card in those things? asking because no matter how much memory you put in there, the bottle neck upgrading the OS will be video processing, the newer the version of the OS the video processing will be larger too, which sucks IMO.

I do not have a mac ok? but when I built a mac OS pc just for fun (when they went to intel instead of motorola) what I noticed was the same than with PC's os's, the new OS will ask for more video power for some reason.

Just a thought, can you put Linux in that thing?

[schwa86]

I just put linux mint on a 2011 MacBook Air that my son had abandoned and it seems to work pretty seamlessly.

[slowpoke]

Just won a govdeals auction from the surplus property department at my university for a mid 2010 Mac Mini. Grabbing it Tuesday morning.

Anyone here upgraded RAM on one of theirs? RAM is easy on these, hard drive requires some digging to get to, and not sure an SSD would do much for my intended use.


Upgrading the RAM is super straightforward. If you can find a cheap SSD, upgrading that would def yield some benefits.

Also if you're looking to turn this into a basic media center, I would potentially look into AirServer so you share your iPhone or Macbook screen with the Mac Mini ("AirPlay" in Apple terms).

[weaponsgrade]

I’ve got a 2011 Mac mini. Upgraded the RAM to the unofficially supported 16gb and also put in an SSD drive. It runs like a champ. I recently upgraded the OS to High Sierra from El Cap because some applications I need to run are no longer supported on El Cap. Mojave isn’t supported on the 2011 Minis. I had some hiccups on the OS upgrade but everything seems to be working fine now.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[sg8357]

Ifixit, the Sheldon Brown of computer repairs.
and like Harris Cyclery, they will sell you the odd tools
you need.


https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Mac_Mini_Mid_2011

[MaraudingWalrus]

Picked it up today. Got a new OS installed on it (High Sierra).

It's a bit slow as expected running the big flashy new OS with its 2GB of RAM - chrome seems to want to suck all available RAM (fluttering around at about 1.7-1.8GB of usage right now when all I have is two paceline tabs open & a podcast tab).

It was able to stream an NBA game very smoothly at high resolution without hiccups -already ahead of the chromecast/screen mirroring situation I had previously been mostly using to watch out of market games that aren't on national TV.

However, I did already go ahead and grab 16GB of ram and a small SSD. May as well commit to the thing and make it as good as I can for the long run.

[CMiller]

I think you could get it to boot from the external SSD, that should be much faster than the HDD, good luck!

[45K10]

Picked it up today. Got a new OS installed on it (High Sierra).

It's a bit slow as expected running the big flashy new OS with its 2GB of RAM - chrome seems to want to suck all available RAM (fluttering around at about 1.7-1.8GB of usage right now when all I have is two paceline tabs open & a podcast tab).

It was able to stream an NBA game very smoothly at high resolution without hiccups -already ahead of the chromecast/screen mirroring situation I had previously been mostly using to watch out of market games that aren't on national TV.

However, I did already go ahead and grab 16GB of ram and a small SSD. May as well commit to the thing and make it as good as I can for the long run.

Man, thanks for posting this. I have had to revive a Mac Mini (Mid 2010) I had laying around since my Mac Air decided to melt down a couple of months ago. I didn't know I could push it to 16GB of Ram. I am also running High Sierra but with 4GB of Ram. It works but it can be a little slow sometimes and it takes forever to compile code.

[BassoBry]

I've got a late 2014. It's doing pretty well. I occasionally run LR and FCPX on it and it gets a little bogged down. I saw this thread and got excited about the possibility of upgrading the ram. Then I researched it, for the 2014s the ram is soldered to the board. Previous models it just snaps in. Literally no tools required. Amazing. Bummer they changed it. Classic Apple move though tbh.

[sg8357]

Mini 2012 and the new Mini 2018 both have upgradeable ram.

Mini 2012 has upgradeable disk, Mini 2018 has soldered on ssd, no upgrade.

Apple, the new Ma Bell, "We don't care, we are the iPhone company"
pace Lilly Tomlin.

[93KgBike]

I think you could get it to boot from the external SSD, that should be much faster than the HDD, good luck!

That's interesting. 7200rpm limit on the HD is probably why new systems require (and accept) so much RAM. How pricey is a solid-state external drive that you could boot from?

I haven't really thought about this before. Will have to mull it over. Thanks CMiller.

[jtbadge]

The problem with booting from external seems like transfer rate, I think you're going to have a bad time if you're using USB 2.0, but USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt might be okay.

Also, some of the newer Mac Minis have soldered-on memory that is not upgradeable after purchase. So you might be SOL if your machine is of that vintage.

[93KgBike]

The problem with booting from external seems like transfer rate, I think you're going to have a bad time if you're using USB 2.0, but USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt might be okay.

Also, some of the newer Mac Minis have soldered-on memory that is not upgradeable after purchase. So you might be SOL if your machine is of that vintage.

Agreed.

Project time!

[weaponsgrade]

I was really hoping for the 2018 Minis to go back to the user-replaceable hard drives and RAM. At least they did the RAM. I was ready to plunk down for a Black Friday Mini, but the only ones I found discounted were the lower-spec'd models.

[ojingoh]

That's interesting. 7200rpm limit on the HD is probably why new systems require (and accept) so much RAM. How pricey is a solid-state external drive that you could boot from?

I haven't really thought about this before. Will have to mull it over. Thanks CMiller.

Should not be too expensive. SSD prices have dropped a hell of a lot. You can buy a 480GB Micron/Crucial SSD for $80 now.

Your Mini has USB2 so any external drive will be limited to roughly 30MB/s, not acceptable for modern people. Internally it's going to be SATA II, roughly 300MB/S, but that's peak sustained transfer. FWIW movie files are between 2 and 20MB/s, depending on encoding.

You're right though, getting the drive out is tricky, but if you're going to use this for a few years, what's two hours of your time worth?

[MaraudingWalrus]

Got my ram and SSD swapped in. Definitely runs smoother and quicker, incl. booting up faster.

At this point that's all I'll be able to do to help this one out, as I think the processing speed of this guy will now be the biggest bottleneck in the system.


As many things as I can possibly envision running for my planned usage of this thing (a pair of chrome windows with different streams, and a third with a random web page open) and could only eat 4ish gb of ram - But pushing CPU load up with displaying HD video from said streams. https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20181205/1cd291d94deab09d9b439aa0ab9797b2.jpghttps://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20181205/855cbd9f45b78eb90e4b1d03b82ba694.jpg