Late 2012 Mini Slow on 10.14.6

[gixxerfool]

I bought the Mini in 2014 and added 16G RAM and an external SSD and then made the drives a Fusion drive and it worked flawlessly in this setup, until I upgraded to Mojave. I made a TM backup, reformatted in APFS and installed Mojave then migrated all the data over TM. I always give updates about a week to index and settle down before checking for issues. I did the install about 4-5 weeks ago and it is still slow, lots of beach balling I never had before, slow load times and sometimes nothing happens at all. I also noticed I can hear the HDD spinning now and I do not see the LED flashing on the external SSD as much as I used to. Has something changed in the way the Fusion drives work now? My wife needs the computer for work, so I am limited on when and how much diagnosis I can perform. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Fishrrman]

I would UN-fuse the external SSD, and just let it run AS "an external SSD".

The "fusion issue" may be what's slowing you down.

 

[gixxerfool]

I would UN-fuse the external SSD, and just let it run AS "an external SSD".

The "fusion issue" may be what's slowing you down.

Thanks for the reply! Is there a difference with how Mojave handles fusion drives? Prior to that it ran like a champ with the exact same hardware setup. It was fast and never gave me an issue.

 

[gixxerfool]

For anyone that may find this thread, I found the issue and fix.

After a ton of reading and researching, with Mojave Apple moved to a required APFS format for the drives. That was my original hurdle in order just to update. That was a simple solution of reformatting the drive and then installing the OS. The reason my system got so slow after the update is APFS ignores USB3.0 external boot drive, so everything was running off the internal spinner. The choices were to either:
1. Install the external drive into a thunderbolt enclosure as APFS will see those for boot drives or:
2. Put the drive in the machine via an OWC Data Doubler kit.

The only reason I didn’t put the drive inside in the first place was I wanted to avoid and warranty issues. I’m way beyond that at this point. The Data Doubler kit is nothing more than a tool kit and a SATA cable. Install was a breeze with plenty of videos and instructions out there. I decided to get one of their SSD drives while I was at it. So it was $200 for the 1Tb SSD and the Data Doubler kit.

Install was about an hour or so, I cleaned all the dust while I was at it and installed the included BT shield as well. It was a matter of booting from a USB stick then creating the Fusion drive, formatting, installing, upgrading to Catalina, transferring data, and enabling TRIM. I also got rid of 400+G of excessive data while I was at it.

I went from the pre-Mojave 24 second boot, to a Mojave 4-5 minute boot, down to a 22 second Catalina boot. The rest of the system was responsive as expected across all iterations.

I hope this can help someone.