late 2012 mac mini dual drive culminating in DIY fusion drive

Mijn probleem

I had a 256GB Samsung 470 series that needed a home and my Mac Mini looked like the logical place to put it.

Mijn oplossing

I was in no time crunch & wanted to do a solid job so I went slow. About 2 hours total for the disassembly & install. Everything went fine except for the re-installation of the power supply. For the logic board pull, I think there should be a photo of the two little "wells" or "grommets" inside the top of the case that you are trying to land the legs of the removal tool into.

Problems: Managed to get the AC connector rotated upside-down into position. Yes, I am a brute, but it will click-in that way. All became clear when I tried to slide the logic board back in, and the AC connector was visibly not lined-up. Some additional photos for this step would be helpful.

Following the installation everything booted up fine and I went on to make a DIY "Fusion drive" aka Logical Volume Group.

Mijn advies

The package arrived two days later than expected which was unwelcome, even though it was only making a short hop from SoCal to Nor-Cal. According to the tracking info, it shipped on time, so the delay belongs to USPS rather than iFixit. Moral: perhaps USPS Priority Mail is not the "tech" way to go.

The final assembly of the wireless antenna plate can be nerve-wracking. It seems like it doesn't wanna fit and there is a strong temptation to just put the two shoulder screws in cockeyed and then force it. Don't do it! If that plate is not setting down inside the screw lands, it is because the bottom drive is mis-positioned. Try to get a screw or two into the drive and then just massage it a little. When it hits the right position the antenna plate will click-in perfectly, down to the fraction of a millimeter.

Making the "DIY Fusion" was an adventure mainly having to do with the restore process. My backup was on a Time Machine volume hosted on a Mac (9.1) Server and there were some "tweaks" involved in restoring from a .sparsebundle rather than a regular external drive. Moral: Time Machine works great if you want to restore some files or folders, but it is maybe not up to the job for an entire volume. For a complete volume restore, hook up an external drive and run a clone of your volume using one of the several fine products available. Don't depend on being able to connect to the Time Machine volume hosted on your server. When restoring from a .sparsebundle, you may not get the normal startup screen (auto-login or login screen, depending on options you have set). You might get a "Install Mac OS X" screen. If this happens, let it go ahead and download/install Mac OS X. Everything will come out fine after that. I guess the (disputable) bonus is you get a completely up-to-date system to start with!