Boot MacOS From External SSD On Your 2012 Mac mini - Tutorial

Learn how to boot MacOS off an external SSD enclosure on your 2012 Mac mini to speed it up. This process will work on most older Mac Minis. If you are looking to make your Mac mini computer faster, booting off an external SSD drive is one way to do this. In this video we teach you how to boot from an external SSD making your Mac computer much faster.

If you are interested in booting MacOS off an external SSD drive then this tutorial will provide you with step-by-step directions. Most older Mac mini have a slower spinning hard drive and this process allows the Mac mini to boot from the external SSD making boot and application load times much faster.

In the video we use the following items but you can use any external SSD drive that meets the same specifications:

Better Hardware Options:

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[fallenshallrise]

This is literally the EXACT tutorial I needed. Running an old Mac Mini sometimes to drive a TV and the internal spinning drive died recently. Amazing.

[NashRamblerBlake]

I just want to say thank you for this video. I did this to an older iMac several years ago and promptly forgot how I did it. Your video walked me through it step by step and after watching it yesterday, I immediately went home and setup an external boot ssd on my 2014 Mac mini. Appreciate it!

[jariegarcia]

Wow! This made my MacMini i7 2012 as good as my 2017 MacBook Pro! Thanks for the easy yet detailed step by step!

[donstu]

Viewed several Videos on this topic - your’s was my favourite - clear and precise. Got my Samsung T5 SSD up and running in no time on an IMac late 2015. Vast improvement thank you very much.

[thompmichael]

Craig - reformatted the disk on another mac and all worked perfectly. Many thanks - Have a great Xmas

[alright]

Great video. My Dad does this on his late 2015 4k imac with the fusion drive and it's dramatically faster than the built in fusion drive.

[JohnMHammer]

This was great, Craig! I hope you’ll consider creating another version of this video which uses Disk Utility (or perhaps a third-party utility such as Carbon Copy Cloner) to clone the original boot volume to the new external drive instead of installing a virgin OS on the new external drive. Most people would probably find that to be a better process if they plan to actually use the external as their main drive. And perhaps a video showing how to migrate apps and data or an entire /Users folder from an existing boot volume to a new one.

[williameverets]

Thank you Craig this is what I been looking for when I upgrade my 2013 iMac to SATA drive and Leven 1tb SSD and that will be my bootable drive

[Frank-in-NY]

Good Stuff! Nice job explaining on how to do this. Question for ya, Can you access Data from the non-booted drive?

[timothy]

Nice video. I purchased a used 2018 Mac mini and will do this. I’m new to Mac and didn’t know the sad in this machine was only 128G. I plan on using this as an audio machine for music. Thank you.

[HappyBeeTV-BeeHappy]

Thank you! I can’t wait to try it on my late 2012! I put 16GB ram in it which helped the speed a lot but not nearly enough bcuz it was so bad before the ram upgrade that it couldn’t even awaken from sleep.

[mauricioflores]

Exactly what I was looking for!!!! 😮🙌🏻

[DjDynamitenyc]

Great video thanks note you can do this with a nvme m.2 drive and a enclouser 4 times faster than the 2.5 ssd

[Stormbrise]

Thank you, This solution will work for me because I may need to keep Yosemite on my internal hard disk for program usage. However, it is now buggier than heck, and hard to use anything on since nothing is supported anymore.

[Klaxet]

Nice and clear. I have a question my Mac Mini HD is dead, so if I do the same as you did - take a new SSD and install Catalina on it using my other laptop, can I after that install this SSD to my Mac mini instead old har drive? Hope my question make sense. Thank you.

[carltongamble]

Thanks this was a good reminder for me.

[probitionate]

I boot from a 500Gb external SSD drive for my 2012 iMac. I'm going to be booting from a 1Tb external SSD drive for my 2019 iMac. I have to say to _anyone_ with a non-SSD HD iMac, _use an external boot drive_ Believe me, it's worth the investment (of time and money)

[JohnnyFeathers]

Damn .. I got a 2tb Samsung evo internal ssd for $100 that I just installed in my 2011 Mac mini. Crazy how fast memory costs decrease. In two years I bet my same 2tb ssd will be like $50 or less. As for my upgraded 2011 mini.. it runs almost as fast as my new mini m2. Amazing difference.

[IgorMelnick]

2012 mac minis have an option to internally install a second drive. you need a special cable to plug it in the motherboard. This was no longer an option for mac minis after 2014. You'll get much better speeds that way.

[bioglassmusic]

FW800 drive enclosure makes it even faster or thunderbolt