Adding and splitting a fusion drive Mini 2014

I have a 2014 Mac Mini. I was reading about hard drive benchmarks some people were getting and so I ran BlackMagic Disk Speed Test and found very disappointing results.

Some background. After getting my 2014 new about a year ago, I found it unbearably slow with the 1TB spinner. It was almost unusable to me. So I cracked it open and installed a Samsung EVO 840 SSD I had lying around. Night and day faster.

I then found I could add a controller and add an M2 drive to my mini. This is what is used create a Fusion Drive. I learned the mid level mini had a plug on the motherboard to add the connecter. See photo.



So I bought an adapter off of eBay, and then started shopping for an M2 stick. I learned that Apple uses a proprietary connector on their M2 style drives so I had to buy another adapter. I was able to connect a Samsung EVO 960 using an adapter I purchased on eBay. (Or I could have added an Apple branded M2 from any 2015 or newer laptop with an M2 drive). But we all know an Apple branded drive was much more expensive.

I set up the mini with two separate hard drives instead of creating a fusion drive. After installing High Sierra on the 960 I found I could not boot off the 960 consistently and if the computer went to sleep it would not wake back up. So I did some more reading and learned that some M2 adapters work better than others. So I bought another adapter on eBay and now I have full control of the M2 installed as a primary drive. It now runs on Mojave without issue.

With the EVO 840 SSD I was getting write speeds in the 200's and read speeds in the 400's. I am guessing the older 840 EVO was part of the problem and the SATA bus was the other.

The adapter and drive I added created a PCI-X hard drive that now reads and writes in the 700's.

Moral to my story, my computer is much faster and now I contemplate if I even need to purchase a 2018 mini. Choices...

 

I added the second drive after the first was already installed and formatted with Mojave. Showed up as a second drive that I formatted and use for backup and storage.

I have done some reading and found you can separate a Fusion drive and create two separate drives well as add a second drive and create a fusion drive. However; both methods have to be done using Terminal.

https://www.lifewire.com/split-fusion-drive-apart-2260166