I swapped the 256 GB SSD in my M4 Mac Mini for 2 TB

I bought the M4 Mac Mini at the beginning of the year, basically for OpenClaw, and used it for that for a while. But once Claude stopped the OAuth hack support, I rebuilt basically everything into Claude agents, and quite the journey from there.

Now we're starting to build mobile applications, with Xcode, Android Studio, all the simulators and stuff, and I quickly ran out of space on the 256 base model.

The last Mac Mini with a replaceable SSD

Luckily, these are probably the last Mac Minis where you can replace the SSD. Of course, it has to be a special one or something. Nonetheless, it does work.

It's quite expensive, but I found a good deal for around $300 for a 2 terabyte drive, which is cheaper than what Apple charges for the upgrade, and the drive is quicker than the original one that was in there. 1 terabyte would have been enough, but they were going for $250 or something, so I was like, okay, might as well go for the 2 terabyte one.

Came from China, took some time to arrive, of course, but came with a tool. A spudger and a screwdriver. The screwdriver was really cool: the free spinning cap on top actually has a bearing in it, a super nice fidgety tool that you can just spin and roll and it rolls forever. So that's really a ton of fun.

The swap

Installation itself went quite smoothly. It was good to open that and get some dust out of the fan while we're at it.

The clunky part: DFU mode

Then I had to get it into DFU mode, because with a blank SSD you have to recover the Mac Mini from another Mac. This was a bit clunky, so it took me a while to figure this one out. Apparently on the newer macOS versions this is built into Finder, so I did it from my laptop, but then I had to download a full 20 gig image or something, so that took forever. And I couldn't really use the laptop at the time because it had to be connected to the Mac Mini. So it basically blocked two of my devices. I wasn't aware of that.

Then obviously I had to run the recovery, which took quite a while as well. And the first one failed, so panicked quickly, then unpanicked and just ran it again. This time it went through.

Then it took another fucking 3 hours to play the backup back on the disk, and another 3 hours to move all my Git repos from the external hard drive, where I had stored them before to free up some space, back onto the internal drive.

Verdict

Overall the experience took quite a lot longer than I expected, but now it's all back up and running and it's quite fast and it's real fun. I'm slowly starting to get all my tmux sessions back and all my agents running. Didn't really miss a day because the file transfer ran overnight. Besides the hiccup during the reset I was actually quite happy with the process, and really happy now having this massive SSD.

I think I'm really getting the hang of this, let's call it, home software factory development studio. I've also ordered a cheap Android phone to be able to test these mobile apps on Android. Should be here next week.

And then: keep shipping, baby, keep shipping.