Recommendations needed for SSD to relace HDD

All of the 2012 MacMini’s have a SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) interface for the 2.5” drive. So any SATA III drive will work.

Your list is a bit off as you’ll called out the transfer rates on some and the interface on the others. In addition you’ve listed different sized drives. So there is no direct correlation between them (at least one thing being consistent).

Also keep in mind Western Digital & SanDisk are merged companies, so the drives are one and the same with the current versions of the drive with slight generational differences.

So your list corrected looks like this for 240/250 GB SATA III drives:

• SanDisk Ultra II (older MCL cell drive) Not the latest version of SSD tech but better than the SanDisk SSD Plus as far as speed.
• SanDisk SSD Plus & Western Digital Green (TLC cells) designed to be a cheap SSD.
• Kingston UV500 (3D TCL cells) Uses a Marvell controller which has had issues in some Mac’s..
• Samsung 860 EVO (3D 3it MLC cells) The fastest of the bunch.

There is not issue replacing the current HDD for a SSD. I personally use Samsung EVO drives in all of my systems and thats what I sell when I swap out or upgrade the HDD for a customer (what I stock). Yes, there are cheaper drives which will also work.

There are issues in some models in regard to the optical bay if you plan to install a drive within it. Similar to the MacBook Pro’s, Apple had an issue with the optical drive SATA port due to the clocking of the port. You can see more here in this OWC guide: OWC Data Doubler. While the listing does not directly call out the Mac Mini’s the issue is the same when you compare the CPU’s clocking and the same PCH hardware between the Mac Mini’s & MacBook Pro’s. To be clear this is not an adapter issue this is a timing issue within the Mac’s logic board. As OWC points out you’d need a SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drive to overcome this failing.

I should also point out there are two kinds of SATA interfaces Fixed & Auto The fixed drive can only run at the one speed whereas the Auto can run at different SATA I/O speeds matching to the systems SATA port.

Here the optical bay will require a fixed SATA II drive even though the port will claim to be SATA III in the system report.