2012 Mac Mini Issues

[moral-hazard]

Howdy,

My 2012 Mac Mini, previously running great for years, is now having issues. Mid year last year it started occasionally rebooting itself with a kernel panic which made it sound to me like there was a memory issue. It has some aftermarket parts - 2 x 8gb DDR3 corsair ram which worked flawlessly for 8 years but may be going bad. I also upgraded it to 2 x 2tb Samsung EVO SSD's and reformatted the whole OS last year which did not change the issue. So it continued having the kernel panic once a month or so, rebooting itself, and continuing on its way.

Eventually I got annoyed at the KP and started trying to test the ram with rember. It found no issues the first time, one pass did fail as follows:

Test sequence 1 of 255:

Running tests on full 1634MB region...
  Stuck Address       :                 setting  1 of 16                ok
  Linear PRN          :    setting  1 of 16

FAILURE! Data mismatch at local address 0x000000011dff7788
Expected Data: 0x7fec6c7022df0c9b, Actual Data: 0x7fec6c7002df0c9b

Given that I tried removing one stick of RAM and running it for a while, then the other. At that point I saw no failures with either stick.

It was sort of inconclusive, but now the machine is now behaving even worse, it usually runs for about 2-3 days before totally going unresponsive. Behaviors when this happens:

• (a) I can’t log in on Remote Desktop,
• (b) my attempts to mount shared drives that this machine shares also fail as do time machine backups to those drives,
• (c) machine does respond to pings on the command line, (c) machine does not respond to SSH, or recently I saw it prompting me for a password (should be password less using public/private key), but repeatedly rejected the password even when I had the correct one
• (d) I can hook up a monitor to it and see the display, but it looks totally locked up - plugging in a mouse or keyboard does nothing.
• (e) Plugging int the monitor resulted in it going back to the login prompt, when I clicked my username and logged in again suddenly everything responds again. Something about the monitor got the machine responding again after a while.
• (f) After it resumed, System preferences cannot be opened, it just exits the program immediately. After it locked up, spotlight is not working at all, no results when I search for anything, fails with `EXC_BAD_ACCESS`
• (g) Edit: also now noticing that random system settings appear to be getting lost, my terminal color changed back to white (From black) and the system seems to have "forgotten" other similar settings.
• (h) Rebooting the machine gets it working normally again for a while.

I'm struggling to understand what to do here. Things I can think of:

1. I may try reformatting the machine back to an older OS, as I didn't see any of these issues before High Sierra or so.
2. I may try buying new RAM and replacing it since I hear the new OS'es can be pickier about aftermarket RAM and also suspect my RAM may be defective.
3. I may also shop around for another used mini and gut it for the logic board to replace that.

Any thoughts as to which component may be bad here? Can't really figure out if it's the OS install, the logic board, SSD, or memory.

 

[Boyd01]

Sorry, I can't help with those problems, my 2012 quad mini is still fine although only used as a file/time machine server now. However, before spending more money on an old computer with issues you might consider a fourth option: get a 2018 Mini. The base i3 Intel Mini has a geekbench score about the same as the top 2012 quad 2.6ghz Mini, but all the other improvements make it much faster, not to mention better interfaces and software compatibility. I see an Apple Certified Refurb (with full 1-year warranty) is currently available for $599 or you could probably find a used one for much less. This assumes that you want an Intel Mac, of course. There are also refurb M1 Mini's available from Apple.

Refurbished Mac - Mac mini

Save up to 15% on a refurbished Mac mini. Tested and certified by Apple including a 1-year warranty. Free delivery and returns.

www.apple.com

 

[moral-hazard]

Sorry, I can't help with those problems, my 2012 quad mini is still fine although only used as a file/time machine server now. However, before spending more money on an old computer with issues you might consider a fourth option: get a 2018 Mini. The base i3 Intel Mini has a geekbench score about the same as the top 2012 quad 2.6ghz Mini, but all the other improvements make it much faster, not to mention better interfaces and software compatibility. I see an Apple Certified Refurb (with full 1-year warranty) is currently available for $599 or you could probably find a used one for much less. This assumes that you want an Intel Mac, of course. There are also refurb M1 Mini's available from Apple.

Refurbished Mac - Mac mini

Save up to 15% on a refurbished Mac mini. Tested and certified by Apple including a 1-year warranty. Free delivery and returns.

www.apple.com

Downside for me on that is that new Minis have less storage capacity - my machine has 4TB (2 x 2tb) and the new ones seem to max at 2tb (and cost a fortune at that price point). :-(

 

[DeltaMac]

How long have you had the two Samsung SSDs installed?
Were you having problems before you upgraded the SSDs?

 

[moral-hazard]

How long have you had the two Samsung SSDs installed?
Were you having problems before you upgraded the SSDs?

Installed them in the fall. Before the SSDs I had the intermittent KPs about once a month (these were fairly peaceful - machine would just reboot itself, it's a headless server used as a storage server so I barely noticed when this happened).

After new SSDs installed, the issues were the same for about six months, but now got far worse with the machine getting totally locked up every few days (does not reboot itself, just locks up).

 

[Fishrrman]

Did you try removing and re-seating the RAM?

Did you try removing the 3rd-party RAM and re-installing the factory RAM?

 

[moral-hazard]

Did you try removing and re-seating the RAM?

Did you try removing the 3rd-party RAM and re-installing the factory RAM?

Re-seating: Yes
Original: No, I don't have the original RAM. May try to buy some if it looks like that is the cause.

 

[Boyd01]

Downside for me on that is that new Minis have less storage capacity - my machine has 4TB (2 x 2tb) and the new ones seem to max at 2tb (and cost a fortune at that price point). :-(

Of course, the 2018 might not be the right choice for a number of reasons. But there's also a "quality vs quantity" issue when you are talking about SSD. On the 2012 Mini, the internal SSD tops out around 500MB/sec write speed and an external USB SSD tops out around 400MB/sec.

On the 2018 Mini, the 2tb internal SSD writes around 2,700MB/sec (I have one myself) while a USB-C SSD (such as my 2tb Samsung T7) reaches almost 1000MB/sec. So you could pull your two 2tb internal SSD's from the 2012 Mini, put them in an external enclosure and they would be about twice the speed of the internal disks on the 2012 (assuming they are capable of that speed).

Here's the thing, my 2012 quad-core Mini is a great machine that served me well for a number of years, but when it dies I will not invest any time or money to fix, it's just too old and wouldn't be worth the effort or expense. That's just a personal choice though, and your calculations could be completely different. Also, you haven't told us WHICH 2012 Mini you have. If it's just the regular dual-core i5, then I would really question whether it's worth spending any time or money.

 

[moral-hazard]

Of course, the 2018 might not be the right choice for a number of reasons. But there's also a "quality vs quantity" issue when you are talking about SSD. On the 2012 Mini, the internal SSD tops out around 500MB/sec write speed and an external USB SSD tops out around 400MB/sec.

On the 2018 Mini, the 2tb internal SSD writes around 2,700MB/sec (I have one myself) while a USB-C SSD (such as my 2tb Samsung T7) reaches almost 1000MB/sec. So you could pull your two 2tb internal SSD's from the 2012 Mini, put them in an external enclosure and they would be about twice the speed of the internal disks on the 2012 (assuming they are capable of that speed).

Here's the thing, my 2012 quad-core Mini is a great machine that served me well for a number of years, but when it dies I will not invest any time or money to fix, it's just too old and wouldn't be worth the effort or expense. That's just a personal choice though, and your calculations could be completely different. Also, you haven't told us WHICH 2012 Mini you have. If it's just the regular dual-core i5, then I would really question whether it's worth spending any time or money.

It's the late fall model, dual-core i5.

Disk write speed is not important to me as all of the writes on this machine come over the network (gigabit) and most of them are time machine which operates so slowly that throughput is not the limiting factor.

The reason I strongly prefer the 2012 it is that I am able to have the two disks neatly inside the machine rather than external disks, which keeps cables and clutter to a minimum. It's the perfect machine in that regard. I may try the lighter weight options (OS reinstall to an older version like High Sierra, memory swap) before declaring defeat and going for a newer machine.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Have you already run First Aid/Repair Permissions in Disk Utility or a tool such as Cocktail? Obviously, there are more thorough utilities/tools (e.g., TechTool Pro), however, it seems as if you’d choose to go with an OS reinstall before investing in those.

 

[moral-hazard]

Have you already run First Aid/Repair Permissions in Disk Utility or a tool such as Cocktail? Obviously, there are more thorough utilities/tools (e.g., TechTool Pro), however, it seems as if you’d choose to go with an OS reinstall before investing in those.

Ah, this is a good call, honestly did not think of that one.
Ran first aid on all 3 partitions, all came back with the message that they appear to be OK.

I turned off a few other things (cron jobs, etc), weirdly it seems to be behaving for the moment. Going to leave it for a bit and see if it holds up, if not will move on to reinstall.

 

[ThirteenXIII]

what macOS version is currently on the Mac?
which macOS version was installed when it began the KP?

Do you have an external USB drive you can install a new copy of macOS on? perhaps Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks? and then boot to that external drive and see if the KPs persist?
if you do boot from the external drive either try to disconnect physically the 2x2TB SSDs or eject from Disk Utility when booted from the external drive.

if you replace the ram, try from MacSales/OWC as they have more reliability than most other ram providers.

 

[Kaida]

2012 has no problem with aftermarket rams, it was those 2008-2009 machines that are pretty fussy with rams.
Option 3 to buy another mini to get the board may be a better option.

 

[moral-hazard]

This is pretty weird but I turned off all the cron jobs on the machine and now I get no KPs, no hangups, no lockups. I was running a few programs I wrote - one webserver, a few node.js scripts, and one node.js application that repeatedly created headless browsers using nightmareJS. The latter especially seemed to be causing a lot of issues for reasons unknown.

Unclear if there is a bug in the software I was using there (leaking processes, memory, etc) or just the fact that the extra work reveals a hardware issue - guessing the latter because even bad software shouldn't really be able to cause memory corruption type issues or lockups.