One of the reasons I chose to add an M.2 drive instead of replacing the spinny 2.5″ disk with an SSD, is that doing the latter seemed like a real pain on this model of Mini.

The first sign that I was going to run into trouble was how smooth the hardware installation went. How can an i5 processor run at 1.4ghz?.But if you have found yourself in possession of some components that aren’t playing nice together, read on.

If your planning on doing a project like this but haven’t bought any hardware yet, please skip to my rant at the end of the article for some shopping advice. Note that had I done a little more research before starting this adventure, I could have avoided a bunch of headaches. So started a long, misguided journey to carry out one of the few upgrades available for this particular model of the Mini - adding a PCIe SSD.

Unfortunately, after upgrading it to the latest version of macOS, it was almost too sluggish to use. Recently, I found out some of my web pages didn’t look so great on Apple devices, so I picked up a late 2014 Mac Mini so I could have a device running Safari natively.

Pcie ssd for mac mini 2014