The Ultimate Mac mini: How To Clone A Hard Drive Or SSD (Target Disk Mode)

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Parts:

Over the next few weeks, I'll be putting together a new video series called, "Building The Ultimate Mac mini." This series revolves around upgrading a Mac mini as much as possible to create a Mac that's almost better than any of Apple's build-to-order minis. Let's take a look at some of the parts that we'll be using.

Here are the parts used in this series:

Mac mini Intel Core i5 or Intel Core i7 (Used in this series)
Kingston HyperX 16GB RAM Kit
Kingston HyperX 240GB 3K SSD
Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SSD
iFixit Dual Drive Kit
iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit

Of course, you don't need these exact parts, but this will give you a good place to start looking if you'd like to follow along with the series. To put it into perspective, the Mac mini that we will be building totals out to $1,243 including all parts. If you wanted to order a Mac mini from Apple with roughly the same specifications (no performance difference, just dual 240GB SSDs) you'd have to shell out $1,899. That's a difference of $656!Save yourself some money, buy the parts, and follow along.

Obviously, the DIY method of building a great computer is the winner here. So stay tuned for this upcoming series. I will be posting more videos from the series over the coming weeks. I'd like to give a huge "Thank you" to iFixit and Kingston for sponsoring this video series and providing all of the required parts.

I hope you enjoy this, and please, if you'd like me to do other "build videos" leave your suggestions in the comments section.

RATE, COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE! :-)

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I know this video is 6.5 years old as I write this but all this applied equally back then:

As long as your Mini's old drive was working and you could boot from it, there was no need to use a second Mac and Target Disk Mode. You could have directly connected the external SSD to your Mini and cloned using Disk Utility or a good third-party application such as Carbon Copy Cloner. There's nothing strictly wrong with what you did, it was just unnecessarily complicated and added the requirement of a second Mac into the mix, something many people won't have access to.

Another thing to consider is that a typical inexpensive SSD in an external enclosure with USB 3.0 is still way WAY faster than any spinning platter HDD regardless of its interface (internal or external). Since it's kind of a PITA to get at the drive bays in a Mini it might be better to just leave the internal drive or drives alone, use a USB 3.0 enclosure instead of a a slow USB 2 enclosure (or use a Thunderbolt enclosure if you want but while it's theoretically multiples faster than USB 3.0 in actual practice it barely makes any difference), and then boot from the external. You can use the internal drive for emergencies if your external ever goes bad or to use as a Time Machine or other backup drive or just to keep big bulk files that don't benefit from speed such as movies, TV shows, music, and pictures.

JohnMHammer

Hi, if you had installed the SSD directly to your Mac Mini via USB 2.0, could you not just have made the cloning from Disk Utility with the Restore feature?

jambazz

Thank you for the instruction. Thank you also for taking time to prepare this video for the general public, without such generous people like you for transfer of technology, we'd have struggled, a lot to achieve cloning process.

sreekumarUSA

Will this work with MacOS and Windows on the same Mac??

HLVM

I have an IMAC with dual boot mac and windows, can I clone it and install it in Mac mini? will it work or not ?

besmeltammo

I want to transfer my data from my existing mac mini to a 2019 mac mini. My existing mac mini has a video problem and that prevents my old mac mini from booting up. The monitors have a green/light green vertical stripes and the boot up process gets about half way and then stops. The old mac mini then will try to re-boot over and over. My question is, can I transfer the data to the new mac mini without having a monitor connected to the old mac mini? Thanks

danbrackett

Is this option still a viable solution to backup a Mac mini?

jodi

If i do this. Will it fix the “apfs inverter failed” that i get when i just use my mac mini?

zoso

Can you clone your ssd in a MacBook to an external with this method???

DjBlaaack

Can my Macbook Pro act like the Mac Mini in the same way? (Hooked up to my iMac, that is said.)

Macke

I don't have an enclosure. So can I instal the new SSD, and then hook my Mac mini to another computer, press T to put it in target mode, and then load the software on the new SSD from the Mac I'm hooked up too. I do I just have to get a freaking enclosure?

princeherod

Does anyone know if this technique will copy over the 'purgeable data' mine sitting at an extra 240GB. Just can't get rid of it, and don't want it to copy over on a smaller SSD.

sandymclea

Let's assume I have an iMac running Windows 7 only and six exactly the same Macs with empty HDDs. Would this method work with the Windows 7 installation as well?

Inkrementalgeber