Older Mac Mini Verified Upgrade - 8GB 1333MHZ

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All:

First post, I have seen many questions around the net about how far you can upgrade a Mac Mini 2009, before the design change...anyways, I have verified the following work flawlessly.


1. Solid State Drive - I installed one in a mini and just used Disk Utility to clone by original pathetic 5400 RPM drive. I cant believe they still use these in some Macs...I know that this has been done before but it was nice to see that it can handle this upgrade without any special mods.

2. Here is the real exciting one.... as most know, the new Mini has the ability to use 8 GB of RAM. Apple states that the older 2009 only goes up to 4 GB DDR3 1066 MHZ. I just took a shot in the dark and installed 2 x 4GB DDR3 1333MHZ used in the Mac Pro and it worked flawlessly!!!! The system recognizes it right away and shows that it is 1333MHZ. I have also run a few memory utilization apps while running Photoshop and all 8GB are being used.


These 2 changes have made my 2.53 Core-two Mini extremely quick. Boot-up in about 19 seconds and shutdown in about 15 seconds.

To be clear, I did this with an 09 Mini, bought the SSD on ebay for 100 bucks and bought 2 x 4GB 1333MHZ RAM on ebay for about 120 bucks.

I hope this helps those debating if 8 GB works on the older Mini.
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
G'day and welcome to the forums.

Should you have slowness in booting from the SSD etc, do a clean install of the OS and use Migration Assistant to move over applications and so on. Setting up my SSD OWC advised not cloning.
 
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interesting

interesting, I have done a clean install on a PC and it was indeed faster. I should probably give it a try, the mini is plenty fast for me now but its fun to push it. Thanks for the feedback.
 

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