Solid statesman
If Mac speeds are sluggish, upgrade the storage for a huge speed boost
There’s something refreshing about starting with nothing and waiting until I miss apps
Back in the April 2017 issue (#311), I had a major decluttering session to speed up the startup times on
this Mac mini. The time from the power-on chime to the login screen hasn’t got any worse since then, but upgrading to High Sierra has made the delay from logging in to actually getting anything done embarrassingly long. Never mind having time to put the kettle on; I can make coffee, forget about it, heat it back up in the microwave, drink it, and come back down off the caffeine buzz before this Mac is ready to go.
An SSD will make a huge difference: possibly enough to allow me to forego the microwaving step altogether. But a 480GB drive, which would be the closest match for my existing 500GB hard disk, is too expensive. This Mac is five years old and spending £130 on it at this point is just taking money away from the fund for a new MacBook Pro. So instead I am going to economise and opt for a 240GB drive for £60 (uk.crucial.com).
Get fresh and squeeze in
To squeeze 475GB into a 240GB drive, I could have embarked on another laborious round of uninstalling and downsizing. Instead I decided to just install macOS afresh on the new drive.
There’s something very refreshing about starting with nothing and waiting until I miss each app before I reinstall it. And because I’m putting the old drive in a USB enclosure, I can still start up from it, if it turns out there are any irreplaceable open-source utilities that aren’t available any more. In terms of data, all my mission critical stuff has been kept in the cloud for years now. And any data that isn’t in the cloud – like bulky video projects and game saves – is supposed to be migrating over to the external drive anyway. That was originally the whole point of this
exercise, before I got distracted!
Backup of a backup
Before fitting the new disk, I ran a full backup with SuperDuper, just as a precaution. Then as another layer of precaution, I made a macOS install disk on a USB thumb drive.
Normally, when you wipe your internal drive, you are either restoring an existing backup or reinstalling macOS from the Recovery system on that same drive. But this will be a virgin drive so it won’t have a Recovery partition yet, and I don’t want to take the chance of something going wrong with the old drive when I take it out.
All my Torx screwdrivers were 225 miles away, enjoying the seaside air and fabulous views
So I downloaded High Sierra from the Mac App Store, but quit the installer when it opened. Then I opened Terminal and typed: sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/ createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/ UNTITLED && say Boot Installer Complete The ‘&& say’ is a neat little trick: it enables us to chain commands together, so that when the install disk is ready, macOS speaks a message to let us know. So I could watch YouTube for 10 minutes while the files copied, and wait for the audio alert to let me know it was ready.
I set the thumb drive as the startup disk in System Preferences and started up from it once, just to make sure that I wasn’t about to saw off the branch I was sitting on. Then I shut down the Mac, unplugged the keyboard and monitor from the mini and flipped it over to remove the circular belly hatch.
All Torx and no action
Right away I realised my mistake. I’ve been working with mid-90s Macs for too long and I’d forgotten that all modern ones use Torx T8 and T6 screws to secure the internal components. All my Torx screwdrivers were 225 miles away, enjoying the seaside air and fabulous views. There was a frankly embarrassing interlude wherein I attempted to fashion screwdriver bits out of 3D printer filament and hot glue, before I gave up and ordered a new screwdriver set for next day delivery. (Note to self: this set
stays in London!) With the new screwdrivers, the business of physically installing the SSD was fairly straightforward. The later Mac minis are packed
together pretty tightly and the hard disk is less accessible than on many MacBooks. But if you follow an online teardown guide for the mini, you’ll find yourself doing far more than you need – including disconnecting the delicate IR sensor, and buying a special tool to remove the motherboard. In fact, all you need to undo is the fan cowl and the Wi-Fi aerial plate (see this month’s How To guide). While I had the lid off, I also took the opportunity to huff and puff away the three-little-piggies’ worth of dust that had collected inside.
Blink and you’ll miss it
To install macOS, I plugged in the USB thumb drive and turned the mini back on. It started up in the installer and prompted me to initialise the SSD. I chose the ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ file system and the GUID partition scheme. If you have never formatted an SSD before, it’s quite fun. As you click Erase, blink slowly. When you open your eyes, it’s done. Similarly, installing High Sierra took just a few minutes.
After I restarted from the SSD, I found that macOS had remembered several things from my old install, such as my login photo and the website passwords stored in Safari. This was very handy for me, but I wonder how I could have prevented it, if I was actually trying to create a ‘clean skin’ copy of the system?
So far, the only apps I’ve reinstalled are Scrivener, Fusion 360 and Slic3r (for 3D printing), Numbers, and SuperDuper. There are bound to be some other things to add back in later on, but it is surprising how many apps I couldn’t bring myself to trash from the old installation, and yet I have no pressing desire to install on the new one.
Overall, the Mac mini now feels like a new machine. I still have 211GB available on the SSD and all of the old hard disk to use as an overspill. Best of all, startup times from chime to login screen have dropped from 2 minutes 45, to just 15 seconds! In terms of bang-perbuck, this is easily the most effective hardware upgrade you can perform on an older Mac.