New Crucial Ssd Isnt Showing Up For Install On Mac Mini

David Hodson's answer is half-correct. It *is* just a standard HDD swap, however: 1) A guide to installing Leopard or Snow Leopard won't help because the 2011 Mac Mini won't run any OS X older than Lion. You *could* use another computer to install Lion on the SSD before fitting it, or wait for and buy the USB-stick version of Lion. However 2) The good news is you should be able to just fit the SSD blank. Java for mac os x 10.7 update 5. I believe the Mini's 'Internet Recovery' will allow you to connect to Apple and download and install Lion directly.

All you need is your WiFi key or Ethernet cable:). Yes, any SSD will work. I'm running an OCZ Vertex2 120 GB SSD. Just make sure you upgrade to the drive's latest firmware version after installation. As for OS install, I put the old drive into an external enclosure and booted from its Recovery partition.

From there, I did a fresh install of Lion on the internally installed SSD. But I should have researched better. Holding COMMAND+R brings up Internet Recovery, which will install Lion, pulling it from Apple's servers, on even hardrive without any data on it. If all you're doing is replacing the hard drive that's already there, then you're just performing a basic hard drive swap. Make sure you've got the right size (a standard 2.5' 9.5mm laptop drive), and you're good to go after installing the OS.

I personally prefer to just use a Time Machine backup to restore to the new drive. Update I have become aware that the OS install is quite a bit different for Lion than for Leopard and Snow Leopard, thanks to the other people providing answers. I would trust someone more fluent in Lion than myself for OS install tips, but my answer about the physical hard drive is still correct.

So I just picked up a new 1TB Samsung Evo SSD that will be coming in the mail next week at a grate price (Ill post the link below). How to install? Discussion in 'MacBook Pro' started by Cuniac, Jul 27, 2015. Use iPad Pro as Your Mac Mini Display With Luna Display!

Check, everyone! Pretty slick, isn't it? Those are ThunderBolt speeds!

And some of the better ones at that! I just got my Mac mini yesterday, and today, I faithfully put 8GB of RAM into it. This is off-topic, but boy does the extra 4GB make a difference when you're dealing with the OS paging to the 5400rpm stock drive. At any rate, regarding the aforementioned article, the trick as to how to get the almost 1GB/s for both read and write speeds is to get two (2) SATA III (6Gbps) solid state drives. Doesn't have to be OWC's. It can be a couple of OCZ's or a set of Intel 510 drives.

Incidentally, if anyone has any questions about OS X 10.7 Lion, I think I'll be able to help. I have been using Lion exclusively since Dev. Preview 4 and the installation shouldn't get in the way of this at all.

There are a number of different ways to install/upgrade/clone, etc. We should be fine. I've also been an enthusiast when it comes to SSD technology for a while. My first one was the 1st gen. Intel X25-M 80GB and it cost me a hefty $550 and that was considered very cheap at the time. There were no fancy features such as TRIM or NCQ either.