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OLDGUYWITHAHIFI

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Original poster
Nov 14, 2018
235
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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.

apple_mac_mini_late_2014_4.jpg


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...
 
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How did you go about installing not as Fusion Drive? Does the HDD now just show up as another drive that you control the reads/writes to (instead of MacOS controlling how the drives are shared)?
 
How did you go about installing not as Fusion Drive? Does the HDD now just show up as another drive that you control the reads/writes to (instead of MacOS controlling how the drives are shared)?

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
 
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