Torx T6, Torx T8, and 2.0 mm Hex screwdrivers (I had a 15-piece set from The Source that is no longer available, but you could choose the NewerTech 11-piece set, which also has a pry tool that could be handy).2.5' SATA Solid State Drive (I chose a 250 GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO).

An external bootable disk/volume with Disk Utility and Terminal included (you may want a macOS Recovery partition as well).

External storage for backups with at least the capacity of your two internal drives (in my case, I needed at least 2 TB).

A Mac mini (2011 or 2012) with two internal hard drives configured as a RAID (it's certainly possible to upgrade your single drive Mac mini to a Fusion Drive, but it requires an extra drive mounting kit and many more steps, so it will not be discussed here).

This article documents the most effective way I found to do so and the resources I used, providing additional details along the way that would have been helpful to me. I knew I could create a Fusion Drive on my Mac mini so long as there was one internal SSD and one hard drive, so I decided to do that to improve my performance.

Since I was taking up less than 700 GB of space on the internal drives of my Mac at home, I could afford to remove one of the two 1 TB hard drives, at least with regards to the amount of storage I needed. 4 processor cores), I attributed the performance bump to the presence of an internal SSD. Since some aspects of the Late 2014 model were not as good as the 2012 model (mostly 2 vs. When my hardware at work was upgraded from a Late 2012 Mac mini (single HD) to a Late 2014 Mac mini with a Fusion drive, I noticed a significant performance upgrade. I've been using my Mac mini Server (Late 2012) for some time now in a RAID 0 configuration (2 internal 1 TB hard drives, showing up in the Finder as a single 2 TB volume).

250 gb ssd for mac mini late 2012