This unibody-style Mac Mini had been displaying a flashing folder with a question mark on boot, which is a sign of hard drive failure. I put a new SSD into the Mac – and that was not easy!
On the surface, this looks like a late-2012 Mac Mini, with the two thumb ‘dimples’ on the base you can use to unscrew the bottom cover, and an antenna plate which is not the full size of the base of the Mac. So I began following the late-2012 Mac Mini teardown on the iFixIt website.
But 0nce I had removed the logicboard, I still couldn’t take the old disk drive out – and what I was looking at didn’t tally with the photos and description on the iFixIt page. So I checked out the iFixIt teardown for the late-2014 Mac Mini model too, and then I was able to navigate through the rest of the repair… But this isn’t a late-2014 Mac Mini! This Mac doesn’t have the full-size circular antenna plate, nor the ‘fusion drive’ storage configuration, with an NVMe SSD alongside a larger STAT hard disk.
Eventually I was able to remove the old drive, and install a new SATA SSD. I opted for an MSI Spatium SSD here, which has excellent reviews but is not a make or model I have personally tried before.
During reassembly, I ended up hopping between the 2012 and 2014 Mac Mini pages on iFixIt (you can see this in the video) in order to keep track of what I was looking at. Was this some kind of ‘parts bin’ Mac, built right on the cusp of the changeover from the 2012 design to the 2014 design, utilising elements of each model? Or possibly, a previous repairer has retro-fitted some parts, somehow?
Either way, I think it’s been opened up before; the antenna plate has taken a bit of a ding, and once I had removed it I was unable to reattach it with all the screws again, try as I might. I had a go at straightening out the edge of the antenna plate where that was warped, but I wasn’t able to apply pressure in the right way without risking damage to the attena cable. You can see this in the video too. In the end, I just fixed it on with only one screw, and trusted that the bottom plate of the Mac Mini case would hold it in place well enough, considering that the Mac will live in one place and not get carted around.
Once the Mac Mini was fully reassembled (with the exception of one stubbonr retaining screw for the antenna plate, that is), I booted the Mac into the network recovery mode, formatted the new SSD, and downloaded and installed OS X 10.9 (‘Mavericks’). Once I had verified that the Mac was behaving normally and the new drive would work as an install location for macOS, I updated to my favoured released of macOS 10.14.6 (‘Mojave’).