It also has a five-year warranty and a longer expected lifespan than most hard drives if you’re willing to pay more, the 850 PRO version has a ten-year warranty that eclipses all but the most expensive enterprise-class desktop hard disks. The Samsung 850 EVO I installed in my iMac is 5 times faster than the 1TB hard disk it replaced and has no moving parts, so it’s tiny, silent and cooler-running. Today, excellent quality SSDs start at $60 (120GB), climbing to $120 (250GB), $231 (500GB) and $420 (1TB) - still not as cheap as traditional drives, but better. SSDs are faster, more reliable, and a lot more affordable. It’s hard to believe, but back in 2008, Apple offered a 64GB solid state drive upgrade to the original MacBook Air for a whopping $1,300 premium over the laptop’s normal price. At that time, a consumer 1TB drive cost around $4,000, and Apple wasn’t even attempting to sell one.Ī lot has changed even over the past year. So below, I’ll show you some great SSD options that you can install yourself, ask a tech-savvy friend/repair shop to handle for you, or choose as external solutions. Similarly excited readers have pointed out that older MacBooks and certain other Macs are also easy to upgrade… but at least one Mac (surprise: the Mac mini) is not. Last week, buoyed by (finally!) reasonable SSD prices and a desire to try a DIY project, I walked through the steps to replace a prior-generation iMac’s hard drive with an SSD.

Now I’m seeing five times the hard drive speeds, apps are loading instantly, and my iMac feels as responsive as the MacBooks and iPads that beat it to the SSD game.

Even with 400GB of available space, OS X Yosemite’s constant hard drive accessing had brought my quad-core, 3.4GHz Core i7 machine to its knees.

After installing a solid state drive (SSD) with no moving parts, the drone of my iMac’s hard drive and fans has given way to such an absence of sound that I only hear the high-pitched squeal of my office lights.

Late 2012 mac mini ssd upgrade