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I just completed a much-needed project on my old i5, 8GB 2014 Mac Mini: replaced the HDD with an SSD.
At first, I couldn't even get the the mac to recognize and mount the SSD so I could clone, but I finally got that working.
I tried using EaseUS cloner[^] without success.
I then tried the free version of Carbon Copy Cloner[^] and it took a bit over an hour to clone the drive but it succeeded.
Finally, I disassembled the Mac Mini following these fantastic instructions: Mac mini Late 2014 Hard Drive Replacement - iFixit Repair Guide[^]
You actually take every piece out of the Mac Mini case (main board, power supply, everything!) to get the old HDD so you can replace the SSD. It is insane!
I am very happy to report that I was able to re-assemble the thing with the new SSD. I've rebooted the machine and it is 20 times faster. Everything is so much better!!!
I'm not exaggerating here --> Previoulsy I would run a command like ls -al in a dev directory and the prompt would blink for 3 seconds before it even started to do something. XCode (iOS dev IDE) runs quite nicely now and the iphone emulator runs well too. Amazing.
This was a great New Years Day project! I like the ones that end in success, the best. 
Posted via FireFox on my Mac Mini (wouldn't have even tried this before).
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Now that you've got it nailed, it sounds like you could start a business refurbishing i5's!
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Nice job.
Carbon Copy Cloner is what we use too. 
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Ron Anders wrote: Nice job.
Thanks, there were a couple of tricky parts. Luckily my son had a #6 Torx Security driver.
I had a #6 torx (star driver) but it wasn't the "Security" type with the hole in the middle. That is really ridiculous!
Also, check the Step 23 (in the ifixit guide[^]). You need a special wire tool to stick in those two holes so you can pry the mainboard out of the case. It is really ridiculous.
I didn't notice I needed a special tool until I got to that step and the thing was already torn apart.
I walked around the house trying to find something with wire that was the correct size that I could use and finally found a spring on an old chip clip. I cut the thing with some tin snips and somehow got it to work. That step is another ridiculous part of the tear down.
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At first, I couldn't even get the the mac to recognize and mount the SSD so I could clone, but I finally got that working.
How did you get this working? I got hung up here doing an iFixit SSD upgrade to my macbook pro and decided to pass on the upgrade.
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Thanks for the info. The kit I bought (OWC 1.0TB Aura Pro X2) had an enclosure but the enclosure only supported the old (current) drive and not the new one. I had put the new ssd in the machine and attempted to set it up using disk utility in recovery mode (or whatever that mode is) but it wouldn't recognize the new drive. After a few attempts I decided to return the drive and put the return funds toward an eventual new machine as I'm coming up on 7 years with the laptop.
Enjoy your spruced up machine!
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If you mean after it's been formatted with APFS or HFS+, it could be you need to use the Startup Manager to tell macOS about the new startup disk... I remember having to do that when adding an SSD boot drive to my MacBook Pro back in 2010. Start booting, but press the Option key as you turn on the power and keep it pressed to get to the Startup Manager.
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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No, I didn't make it that far. It was as if it wasn't there at all as far as Disk Utility was concerned.
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Well, I know it's not the same device at all, but I've now discounted the possibility of me ever taking the time to replace the drive in my (even older) MacBook Pro.
I've been building my own PCs since I was a teenager, but I lack the finesse to take laptops apart...much less Apple ones.
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dandy72 wrote: I've been building my own PCs since I was a teenager, but I lack the finesse to take laptops apart...much less Apple ones.
My first job was building PCs back when Windows 3.0 and 386 chips were hot.
Yeah, I feel the same way about taking laptops apart.
A couple of years ago I bought my wife a brand new laptop and it had an HDD and Win10 started updating and it was terribly slow. I (nervously) took it apart the first night we owned it and replaced the HDD with her older SSD. Instant speed! SSDs are the modern panacea for what ails you. 
Anyways, we had older toshiba laptops (win7 2010 or so) which had nice little doors on back so you could replace or upgrade HDDs and RAM. Now all the laptops are one smooth piece that are tricky to remove and replace.
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raddevus wrote: nice little doors on back so you could replace or upgrade HDDs and RAM. Now all the laptops are one smooth piece that are tricky to remove and replace.
Exactly. I've only ever bought a single brand new laptop in my entire life - everything else was "previously enjoyed". I have a bunch of spare 2.5" drives that I swap around to try out Linux distributions that don't like virtualization all that much. If I can't swap out the drive in less than 2 minutes, I want nothing to do with that laptop.
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I’ve done the same for several older Windows laptops. Makes a huge difference going from a 5400 rpm HDD to an SSD. Like a whole new machine. They were much simpler than what you describe doing. Not sure I would have even attempted it in a Mac. Seems like Apple doesn’t like people fooling around inside their boxes.
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Parsley parses pretty slowly compared to a table driven parser.
It kind of makes me wonder about C# microsoft's parser, which is fast but i heard was also recursive descent.
I need to profile this mess.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Quote: It kind of makes me wonder about C# microsoft's parser, which is fast but i heard was also recursive descent.
What I heard/read, Microsoft worked several more days on it with several dozen programmers. Therefore no need to feel bad for your work  
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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I mean, it's not so much feeling bad, but knowing I can improve it, seeing as how i think my hand written parser is faster right now too thought it really should be *at least* as slow.
Or maybe i'm just expecting too much of it. Unlike PCK it can't stream - because it's recursive descent!, so it has to parse the entire stream into memory before you can have it.
The lag time sucks for large documents. With PCK i was never sure how "fast" it was, because it would start spitting nodes at me instantaneously - it streamed - it was a pull parser generator so it made parsers like Microsoft's XmlReader interface. When building the tree there was lag though, but it was a separate process in PCK. In Parsley it's integrated to the parse. Hard to profile each individually but not impossible.
Unfortunately, I can't generate FIRSTS(k) and FOLLOWS(k) sets for k>1 - I just don't know how and can't figure it out though i read a research paper that gave me an idea, i have yet to try it.
Then *maybe* with a table driven parser i could parse C#, but so far what i've seen of antlr, it can't do it.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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In some code that you posted, it looked like you were using exceptions a lot, maybe even for backtracking. This would be deadly, especially it backtracks a fair bit.
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It doesn't backtrack except when it has to. And in .NET exceptions aren't the perf killer they are in C++.
I could do it without exceptions but it would double the code size as I add TryParse to everything.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Most probably I'm lost in all this parsing stuff...
Quote: it would double the code size as I add TryParse to everything
It is generated code, so who cares?
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Visual studio is starting to choke on it. It wasn't giving me proper line #'s for compile errors in the generated code last night.
The source file is 1.3MB
So... I don't want it to be 2.5 or so.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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zip it 
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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I can minify it. Shave a few KB at least.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Probably a naive question: Would UTF8 be counterproductive?
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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i think it already is
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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0x01AA said: What I heard/read, Microsoft worked several more days on it with several dozen programmers.
I was going to make a catty remark about too many cooks but then realized that a recursive descent parser should actually lend itself well to this kind of parallel development.
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