After several years of Macs arriving with their SSDs soldered to the logic board and not immediately upgradable, the M4 Mac mini arrives with a slotted and upgradeable SSD. While Apple doesn’t officially approve of SSD upgrades on the desktop, it’s possible, and the cool cats at iFixit have once again put together an excellent guide as to how to do it.
Where parts are concerned, AppleInsider has pointed out that a 2TB SSD kit from expandmacmini.com can be ordered for $259, and the M4 Mac mini can be carefully pulled apart, the Wi-Fi module can be left in place, and you can easily get to the base components with a good set of Torx screwdrivers. Once the iFixit guide has been followed, the old SSD has been removed, and the new SSD has been installed, perform a DFU restore via the following steps:
- To get this done, plug the Mac mini into a display of some sort with the HDMI port.
- Hold the power button down.
- While holding the power button down, plug the Mac mini into power.
- Plug the Mac mini into another functional Mac, with one end of the cable on the middle Thunderbolt port. The restore will fail if it’s on anything but the middle port.
- On the host Mac, a window will pop up asking you if it’s okay to connect to the Mac in DFU mode. Allow it to connect, and choose “restore.”
This might be tricky the first time, but it’ll allow the new SSD to be mounted, formatted, and restored to.
If you’ve had a chance to try the upgrade, please let us know about your experience in the comments.
Via AppleInsider, iFixit, and expandmacmini.com