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GanChan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 21, 2005
617
27
My old Intel Mac Mini has been a lot faster since I switched to an external SSD boot drive. Lately, however, it's been crashing every so often. Sometimes it freezes up and goes into beach-ball land while I'm working before it crashes; at other times, I'll get up in the morning and notice that it just crashed overnight, presumably while in sleep mode.

Any reason this issue might just develop on its own after years of satisfactory performance? My apartment's electtical system seems fairly robust, and Mojave has been running fine on the processor. I appear to have sufficient drive space and I'm not using more memory than usual. Are there some troubleshooting steps worth taking, or is my Mini simply dying of old age?

Thanks!
 
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Fire up Applications > Utilities > Console before anything happens and watch system.log when the beachballing/freezing appears. The messages that appear in this log will hopefully be helpful in establishing possible causes.
With that being said, the behaviour you describe can point to the external SSD having become unresponsive, and drive-related I/O errors or timeouts in the log would corroborate this theory.
 
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