#Mac mini memory upgrade 2018 mac#

But theyвЂ™re not saddled with spinning motors, disk arms, or anything else that moves. TheyвЂ™re very sophisticated memory chips, connected to equally complex controller circuits which manage the flow of data hither and yon. SSDs comprise memory chips with no moving parts.

#Mac mini memory upgrade 2018 mac#

More often than not, IвЂ™d start to do something, wander off until the Mac mini was ready, then get back to it.

Using a Mac with limited memory, slow CPU and a spinning hard drive requires infiniteВ patience.

Starting up and shutting down took a long time too, as macOS handled all that virtual memory housekeeping. Trying to do anything was equally painful вЂ“ lots of spinning beach balls while the Mac waited for data. Click on an app icon in the Dock, for example, and IвЂ™d lose track of how many вЂњbouncesвЂќ IвЂ™d watch until it finally opened. ThatвЂ™s why my poor Mac mini slowed to a crawl whenever I asked it to do something. It does so by pushing off a lot of work to вЂњvirtual memory,вЂќ which pages information out to storage when not in active physical memory. MacOS is not bad at navigating slower-speed CPUs and limited RAM overhead. A tiny arm outfitted with sensitive electronics reads and writes data sequentially to the disc surface by changing microscopic parts of the surfaceвЂ™s magnetic polarity. Your data is written to a disc of magnetic material that spins on a central motor. Inside each hard drive is a mechanism that looks remarkably like a record player. Different materials, upgrades in mechanisms and capabilities, much better electronics inside, but mechanically similar enough that thereвЂ™s no mistaking it. The one I disassembled was bigger, slower, noisier, and less reliable than the ones used in computers today, but with the cover off, it looked just the same as a modern one. Hard drives are faster, smaller, and use less energy than ever before, but theyвЂ™re still essentially unchanged in basic concept from the first refrigerator-sized storage devices that IBM developed for its room-sized computers more than half a century ago.ДЄlmost 30 years ago I worked for a hard drive company, and one of the first things I did when I started was to take apart a drive to understand how it worked. In the process, Apple sacrifices a lot of performance.Дў1st-century computing saddled with 20th-century storage

ItвЂ™s little wonder that Apple continues to use them for low-cost, low-margin systems like the Mac mini. The price of SSDs has dropped precipitously in the past few years, but hard drives remain the champion of low cost per gigabyte вЂ“ a 500 GB HDD replacement for a Mac mini costs you less than $50 at retail, while a 500 GB SSD might cost three times that amount. ThatвЂ™s because Apple continues to offer that model with a spinning hard disk drive, and that murdersВ performance. I never expected it to win any races, but what kills the Mac mini compared to the MacBook Air isnвЂ™t the CPU or the RAM. It comes with a 1.4 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Regardless, I strongly recommend considering it вЂ“ not just for a 2014 Mac mini, but for anyВ older Mac youвЂ™d like to pep up.ДЄt $499, the base-model Mac mini is AppleвЂ™s least-expensive Mac, half the price of the MacBook Air but not nearly as peppy. If youвЂ™re using one of these models and youвЂ™re looking for a good way to bump up the performance, an SSD is, quite frankly, one of the only things you can do (unlike older Mac minis, Apple soldered the RAM in place). I finally got around to upgrading my 2014 Mac mini with a solid state drive (SSD).