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I tried opening the terminal and manually blessing the disk with the bless command, but that failed. It saw the new drive, and could mount and unmount it.īut when I tried to switch the startup disk, and it popped a message saying the disk could not be 'blessed'. So I used system restore (⌘-R while booting the Mac), and opened Disk Utility. I replaced the internal drive, and booted the Mini. The drive formatted via the USB-to-SATA adapter, and I cloned the disk successfully using CCC.
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This time, I bought a 2TB SATA III (6 Gb/s) drive from Crucial, to replace an older SATA II Mushkin drive.
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I'd plug the new SATA drive into my USB-to-SATA adapter, clone the disk using Disk Utility (now using Carbon Copy Cloner as of macOS 10.12, since Disk Utility won't restore APFS volumes cleanly anymore), and then use the iFixIt guide for replacing the hard drive in a 2011 Mac mini. I've replaced the drive a couple times before, and never had any issues.
#2019 mac mini hard drive upgrade upgrade
but I haven't lost a file in two decades and I don't want to start now -).Īnyways, my digital cruft has grown to the point it wouldn't fit on a 1 TB main drive anymore, so I decided to upgrade the Mac mini's internal drive to a 2 TB SSD, hopefully giving me another 2-4 years of life out of that computer before I have to find a new backup solution with more than 2 TB of storage. It handles Time Machine backups for two other Macs, it has about 20 TB of external storage connected, and I also use it as a 'home base' to store all my Dropbox, iCloud, and Photos content locally, and store an extra Time Machine backup of all that. I have an older Mac mini (mid-2011 i5 model), and I use it as a general media server and network backup. Who would've thought such a tiny cable could cause so many problems? Tl dr: If you see weird errors when using or formatting a drive internally on a Mac (especially after upgrading to a newer and/or faster SATA hard drive), it could mean the SATA cable needs to be replaced.