My mid-2011 Mac mini had slowed down. Starting with Mavericks, the mini would eventually bog down after a number of days between restarts, and require a force restart or manual one. It took several minutes to power up and start loading apps, and then around 20 minutes, if not longer, to be fully responsive—this despite 16GB of RAM. My late-2011 MacBook Air, with just 4GB, restarts and is available within a couple minutes. I had to figure it out, because I increasingly found myself wasting time and waiting. No pressure, honestly You’d think someone writing would have plenty of ideas, and yes, I did. Restarting would often free up 20 to 40GB of disk space on the mini’s internal 500GB hard drive.

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(See for more about caches.) But the Mac wasn’t any faster after a restart than before. I used WhatSize (which I also ) to free up almost 90GB in unneeded files, which seems to help a little. There was clearly something to do with temporary files and available disk storage slowing things down. WhatSize let me quickly locate and delete 90GB of files I didn't need.

That helped, but didn't fix the problem all the way. Using Activity Monitor, and in the Terminal, the top command, I could see I was often running up against the limits of physical memory, but the Mac didn’t seem to be under “memory pressure,” which would cause a lot of disk activity.

During the slow post-restart, pre-usable phase, neither memory nor disk storage was an issue. Mavericks added, a way to maximize physically installed RAM that gave new life to my MacBook Air. But neither that nor swap, in which hard disk space is used to store inactive elements of memory, was causing problems as well, according to Activity Monitor.

And I didn’t have an easy path to the obvious solution: swapping in an SSD, a solid-state drive that could be orders of magnitude faster than the 5400 rpm hard drive in the mini. The last few years of mini models have hard drives locked away like an idol in the Temple of Doom. IFixit as “moderate,” even though it has 20 steps in each direction. I usually don’t quail at disassembling a Mac, but this had too many chances to go wrong.

Once you crack open the Mac mini, you're still 19 steps from swapping out the hard drive. Not as easy as plugging in an external SSD. But it is, of course, possible to use an SSD in an external enclosure. I went that route, and solved the slowdowns. The many choices for external SSD I came at this problem not wanting to buy a new Mac yet, and also wanting to keep the cost to about $300, while getting something I would reuse with a new computer or for portable storage later. To get a comparable mini with the same amount of storage and memory would cost at least $700, and that’s without a built-to-order Fusion drive (HDD/SSD combo), but a regular hard drive.

What is the best mac laptop for a new mac user. (There’s no SSD option from Apple.) has four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, and Thunderbolt. An SSD connected over Thunderbolt seemed like overkill, and I was already powering one display with the built-in HDMI port and another via DisplayPort using the Thunderbolt connection.

So any Thunderbolt drive would need to have two ports to support passthrough, and I didn’t find any in my price range. (Amazon sells the for about $370, including both kinds of cables.) Other World Computing The SSD I chose has FireWire 800 to provide a fast-enough connection to my Mac mini, plus USB 3.0, so I can use it with the next Mac I buy. USB 2.0 is too slow, and I lacked USB 3.0. That made it an easy choice to go with FireWire 800, which maxes out at a raw rate of 800 megabits per second (Mbps). I wound up with the, which has FireWire 800 plus USB 2.0/3.0, giving me a path forward to any new Mac with USB 3.0.

It’s currently $297, including USB 3.0 and FireWire 800 cables. (There are cheaper options for the same capacity with a single interface.) When the drive arrived, I had to swap some FireWire cables, as I already have another OWC drive attached for backups. I use for incremental and archival backups, and for nightly “smart” clone updates, but I turned to for making my migration due to a special feature it possesses.

Here’s how I proceeded: • Initialize the external SSD. To use OS X Recovery and other advanced features, you need to use the GUID Partition Table format.