Late 2014 Mac mini is slow

[subjonas]

@subjonas
My bad for not seeing the 8Gb of ram. Yes, most of the beach ball is probably due to the slow 5400rpm. The 7200 rpm drive will help. If your external drives occasionally unmount, then I would look at
1, External drives on an underpowered USB hub or a problematic USB hub can unmount all by itself.
2, Don't set external drive to sleep via preference
3, Don't get an energy saving external drive that goes to sleep all by itself (some drives offer econo-mode)

I also run the Mac Mini 2011 as a server as well and I have 2 external RAID boxes hooked up to it. I used to get occasional dismounting, but after I removed the USB hubs and just plug 1/RAID box per USB and set the boxes not to sleep, I haven't had them dismount.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, but my externals are plugged in directly, no hub, and aren't set to ever go to sleep. It’s just a random thing that happens to all my externals from time to time (pretty rarely though), so it might just be something with my Mac.

I have been running my 2014 Mini(s) as servers with two external USB drives for over 4 years. For three years before that, I used a 2012 Mini for the same thing. Never any problems with drives dismounting themselves. These are externally-powered desktop drives, not bus-powered units.

Anyway, while you have the machine open to replace the hard disk, you could put a small 128gb PCIE SSD in the empty slot and use it as your system drive, that would be very cheap and easy to do. It would give you basically what I have, and I don't get any "beachballs".

I don’t doubt that’s your experience, but that hasn’t been mine unfortunately. I use both external power and bus-powered drives.
I’ll look into that small SSD option, thanks.

 

[lixuelai]

I have a 2014 Mac mini i5 8gb and I’ve had the same everlasting spinning beach balls since it was brand new. I didn’t realize it was common to that model until I happened upon this thread. I thought something was wrong with mine, but I just never bothered to fix it since I use it 90% of the time as a file/media server.
Is there something about the 2014 models in particular that makes them so slow? It seems it’s mostly due to the 5400rpm hard drive, but don’t other Mac mini models have similar hard drives in them?

Also I’m considering expanding the internal storage from 1TB to 2TB or maybe even 4TB (I prefer not to go the external storage route if possible). For my usage, what would be my best option? I think SSDs of that size are too expensive and would be overkill speed-wise since I’m mainly using it as a file/media server. Would a 7200rpm HD be best? Is that any easier to install than an SSD? Thanks.

NVME SSD is very easy to install on the Mini. Much easier than a hard drive. You just need a NVME adapter (can be found on Ebay) and the right screws. Takes like 5 mins. Expanding the hard drive storage is not trivial and it makes more sense to just buy an external hard drive.

Very happy with my 2014 (same model as yours). It is very snappy with an Intel 760p I had lying around.

 

[Boyd01]

I’ll look into that small SSD option, thanks.

Long thread on this here. You might want to just skip to the last couple pages where there are recent posts.

Using a Standard M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD in the 2014 Mini

In searching the web a month ago, I wasn't able to find articles on using a standard M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD in the 2014 Mini. I was going to order a Toshiba/OCZ RD400 for some yet-to-be-defined future use NOT in the 2014 Mini (it's a good PCIe SSD that Toshiba will be discontinuing and the 256GB...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[iluvmacs99]

Thanks, but my externals are plugged in directly, no hub, and aren't set to ever go to sleep. It’s just a random thing that happens to all my externals from time to time (pretty rarely though), so it might just be something with my Mac.

Ok, I was referring to your external drives that may have spin down sleep problem and could be firmware related (sometimes on the physical drive's firmware). Once I updated the firmware on my Drobo, no more dismount or spin down/sleep problem on all my externals, so you want to check all your externals if they have any issues with your current OSX you are running. Never assume that it is a mac issue only as I did until I realized it was my Drobo that was causing the issue. Another issue is when there is an issue with SMART and the drive is on its last leg. You can use DriveDX to check all your drives health status. Drives don't just dismount all by itself; they do so because of some underlying problems that you are not aware of.

Hope this helps.

 

[Mac1008358]

My first post in the forum.
Mine is a MacMini late 2014 with: 4Gb ram, 1.4Ghz with Catalina OS. I just replaced the HDD with "Crucial MX500 500GB SSD" last night. I wouldn't say it becomes super fast, but at least back to a usable speed i.e. to open an app in a few seconds, instead of 40 to 50 seconds.

The replacement is pretty easy by following iFixit step by step, however, what went wrong was that a screw (the one to hold the position of wifi antenna cable) was broken when I installed it back (it's my fault to continue to spin it in after it was tight). so please be gentle

 

[subjonas]

Ok, I was referring to your external drives that may have spin down sleep problem and could be firmware related (sometimes on the physical drive's firmware). Once I updated the firmware on my Drobo, no more dismount or spin down/sleep problem on all my externals, so you want to check all your externals if they have any issues with your current OSX you are running. Never assume that it is a mac issue only as I did until I realized it was my Drobo that was causing the issue. Another issue is when there is an issue with SMART and the drive is on its last leg. You can use DriveDX to check all your drives health status. Drives don't just dismount all by itself; they do so because of some underlying problems that you are not aware of.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, since it’s multiple drives of different brands disconnecting, sometimes at the same time, it seems to point toward the Mac being the issue, but I’ll look into the drive firmware.
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NVME SSD is very easy to install on the Mini. Much easier than a hard drive. You just need a NVME adapter (can be found on Ebay) and the right screws. Takes like 5 mins. Expanding the hard drive storage is not trivial and it makes more sense to just buy an external hard drive.

Very happy with my 2014 (same model as yours). It is very snappy with an Intel 760p I had lying around.

Thanks, but again, performance isn’t really a goal for me, just storage capacity. And I have several reasons which I mentioned for wanting to avoid external drives if possible, and I don’t mind a little work in order to do so.

 

[apple_23]

What do you advice for MacMini late 2014 with: 4Gb ram, 1.4Ghz with Catalina OS?

First of all I would NEVER run it with Catalina or any newer macos to come.

The macos of choice is: macos Sierra (10.12).

Why? Apple dropped reasonable memory-mangagement sometime in High-Sierra 10.13, when Message-boxes like "This is a 32-bit-App. Update it. This software won't be supported in future versions of macos" started to come up. My Book-Bok-Air with 8GB consumes 3.5GB of RAM after bootup, it's evident that with 4 GB RAM free memory is valuable.
Besides: in Sierra theres no limitation to only use 64-Bit-Apps. 32-bit-Apps still work perfectly and the macos itself has still many 32-bit-parts

Over the years I found some ways to limit the memory-consumption and "sped-up" the machine

this all is probably only valid for 10.12.(6)

first: remove desktop background-pictures (will save about 500MB)

second: remove any unwanted mission control desktop-spaces (as default macos starts with 2 desktops but if you close the second one it won't be re-opened after restart. If you need it, you can reopen it again (saves again 300-500 MB)

third: partition the hdd at least in two partitions. The Macmini-HDD will be more efficient after that

fourth: use some program like Onyx to do some things like
- reduce any graphical Dok-Effects to minimum (something like app-bouncing)
- execute some maintenance-scripts from time to time
- delete junk-files
- check the hdd from time to time
- rebuild some caches from time to time

fifth: Use something like App-Cleaner to uninstall-apps (or use the uninstall-routine when delivered) (not just put any app into trash to uninstall it (there will remain too many orphaned files)

sixth: Run something like Etre-Check from time to time to locate problems and remove them

seventh: whenever possible use Safari-Browser or, yes, Microsoft Edge. As much als I like Firefox, a freshly started, empty Firefox consumes about 500MB, an empty Edge consumes only half of it (about 250MB)

eighth: Whenever possible avoid using wifi or blutooth, because macos permanently scans for wifi or blutooth-devices in the background (it's natural behavior as it is meant to be so but it heavily decreases the performance if the machine) Only use e.g. blutooth when absolutely necessary (e.g. headphones for music) and close as many programs as possible when using it.

Of course all of this won't make the 4GB,2014 Macmini win races, but it will become more useable, less memory-consuming. With these steps I've made it to reduce memory-consumption from about 3,05 GB after complete boot-up to about 2,3GB and with an opened browser with 4 tabs and 4 other programs opened it still only consumes 2.9GB. The memory-pressure in the activity-program-app should always be green. I even can run a Win-10/32-bit-VM (1GB RAM) in virtualbox without knocking out the Macmini

So why a 4GB, 1.4GHZ, HDD Macmini at all? In my opinion it once was the cheapest way to get in touch with macos to get to know the software and test some things. Nowadays a Macmini base-model costs 2-times as much. Of course it has a more decent hardware-setup but the times when having the opportunity to quickly get an Apple-Computer are over

some "benchmarks":

starting Pages: 14 sec
Starting Numbers: 7 sec
Starting Word 2011: 9 sec
Starting Ecel 2011 14 sec
Starting Safari: 1 minute
Starting Vivaldi-Browser: 1:30 minutes
Starting Gimp: 38 sec

Startup-Time: 2:45 minutes

 

[apple_23]

in addition to my post above:

empty nvram/pram cache from time to time. This will speed up booting and shutdown-procedure.

But after this you have to re-select start-up-volume in system-settings - start-volume

 

[AppleFanatic10]

Change the SSD. That’s what I had to do.

 

[donetus]

current setup of mine is a 128GB NvME SSD plus 750GB HDD (7200rpm), speed is tolerable but i'm planning to change the 750GB to SSD soon. It should make quite a big difference in terms for speed.

 

[elfy]

Quick question. I’ve just ordered a 500GB external SSD to run as my boot disk for my late 2014 4GB Mac Mini. Is there any reason I shouldn’t use the internal 500GB drive as my time machine backup drive? It’s only about half full at the moment and I’ve just realised I already use all the USB ports for various drives, including my current time machine drive.

I realise I could just get a powered USB hub but was hoping to avoid any more spending. Things are tight at the moment!

 

[Boyd01]

Should be fine, however I did have a problem doing that on a 2012 Mini that I gave to my daughters family. Used a 500gb Samsung T3 as a boot drive and after awhile they started having crashes. Long story short.... evidently the internal drive was gradually failing and causing a problem. It was too hard to deal with this remotely, so eventually we gave up and I got them a MacBook Air. The T3 was fine, I am still using it now.

But that was probably just a fluke, I'd go ahead and do it. If you have a problem later then you can deal with it then. In my case, they really were not at all tech-savvy.

 

[elfy]

Should be fine, however I did have a problem doing that on a 2012 Mini that I gave to my daughters family. Used a 500gb Samsung T3 as a boot drive and after awhile they started having crashes. Long story short.... evidently the internal drive was gradually failing and causing a problem. It was too hard to deal with this remotely, so eventually we gave up and I got them a MacBook Air. The T3 was fine, I am still using it now.

But that was probably just a fluke, I'd go ahead and do it. If you have a problem later then you can deal with it then. In my case, they really were not at all tech-savvy.

Thanks man.

 

[elfy]

Okay, I have to say, adding an external SSD as the boot drive on my 4GB 2014 mini has made an absolute night and day difference. It’s so speedy. No hanging around watching a spinning beach ball while an app icon bounces in the dock. Even iTunes which sometimes took, no exaggeration, ten minutes to open, now is up and running in under five seconds. I wish I’d done this ages ago. I just thought there was something wrong with my machine. Didn’t realise this was just how that mini ran with that internal drive.

 

[Fishrrman]

For years here at macrumors, I've been an advocate of improving a Mac's performance by adding an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD.

The post above this one is one more example of why.

Granted, this trick won't work for all Macs. But for those with USB3 and slow internal drives, it's like "night v. day"...

 

[imercado]

Granted, this trick won't work for all Macs. But for those with USB3 and slow internal drives, it's like "night v. day"...

Another trick I've found to boost performance on the 2014 stock low end Mac Mini (with no SSD) is to hold down Shift while booting and leave it running in Safe Mode. I am running Big Sur Beta 6 in Safe Mode on my stock low-end 4GB no-SSD Mac Mini and am also experiencing "Night and Day" difference in performance. Wishing some Mac guru could isolate what the specific difference is in kernel behavior that makes this model run so much better when in Safe Mode.

Anyway...here's a few screen shots for any non-believers out there ;-)

Performance of the stock internal 5400RPM HDD:

For grins, I also ran the Disk Speed Test on the external USB3 Sandisk SSD I have available but am not presently booted from:

 

[imercado]

FWIW, I endured one of the worst computing experiences I've had in recent memory by rebooting into normal (non "Safe") mode so I could get VirtualBox installed. Over 30 minutes later, I barely escaped with this Disk Speed Test screen shot showing I could barely get half the performance out of the stock HDD when not in Safe Mode. Oh the pain. Oh the agony. Shame, Apple! Shame.

 

[Yebubbleman]

I just picked up a used Mac mini (A1347, late 2014 unibody model) and it doesn't seem to run very well.

It's a 1.4GHz Core i5 with 4GB of RAM and Intel HD Graphics 5000. I plan to put an SSD in it, but it currently has the stock 500GB Hitachi 5400RPM disk installed. Apple Diagnostics reports no issues.

It is also running a fresh install of Mojave 10.14.2.

I know it is not a powerhouse, but even doing little things like right-clicking the desktop or opening an app begin with a 2-3 second pause where I wait to see if I misclicked. This is the case with no apps running and plenty of free/available memory.

This is primarily what I mean by "slow" -- not responsive. Not Snappy™

Is there anything I can check or any settings I can change to help? Or is there maybe something wrong that I'm not seeing?

The 500GB hard drives that Apple has been using on Mac minis and 21.5" iMacs from 2012 onwards are ridiculously slow. Also unreliable. They were designed to be super thin, but the RPM speeds are slow and, let's face it, Apple OSes from 2013 onwards (much like Microsoft OSes from the same vintage) are optimized for SSDs and not HDDs.

Sadly, swapping that for an SSD will help, but only so much. That processor is, effectively, the same as was in the contemporary MacBook Air, which means that it is only so fast. Though, that's not what's REALLY making that thing slow. What's REALLY making that thing slow is that 4GB of RAM (which you will not be able to upgrade) because as that RAM fills up, your Mac is using the internal drive as overflow via virtual memory. It's unfortunate that you can't upgrade things like that because it makes a world of difference. I might try to get a newer Mac mini (or a beefier version of that Mac mini, maybe with a better i5 or i7, with 16GB of RAM and with an SSD). Though, be warned that storage is not upgradable on the new Mac minis (where RAM is). So, you'll want to plan accordingly if you're going that route.

 

[imercado]

For anybody still tracking this thread, I am getting noticeably improved performance on the stock 2014 low-end Mac Mini by messing with some of the disable scripts mentioned by Dave Hamilton's article Disable tailspind and spindump to Speed Up your Mac. I have followed some of his links to GitHub scripts that can disable a bunch of agents and daemons, but I won't refer to them here since that's taking your Mac WAY off the reservation and you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences if you do that. BUT, I will say that by running those disable scripts on this humble little Mac mini, I was able to get the same performance out of the stock HDD that I displayed in a previous post (70+MB/sec for both read and write) without having to boot in Safe Mode to do so.

Fun stuff ;-)

 

[zweber]

I'm glad I found this thread. I bought a Late 2014 Mac Mini a couple of years ago for the sole purpose of having a dedicated Plex Media Server. From day one I couldn't figure out why it was so slow. I overlooked the slowness thinking maybe the apps I had installed were taking up too many resources. Apps took forever to open but seemed ok after they were up and running. Plex ran OK for a year but I hated trying to sit down at this workstation and do any work on it. I ran all kinds of hardware tests, which detected no problems.

I guess now I am struggling with whether or not I should even bother upgrading to an external SSD boot drive to fix this problem or buy a newer Mac Mini. All I need it to do is run a Plex Media Server. Most of the time it will be headless.

What is your opinion on upgrades like this? Could I get another 3-5 years out of this Mini? I always wonder how the newer operating systems run on older Apple hardware.

 

[opeter]

I also have a 2014 Mac mini and I did change the internal 1 TB HDD to a small 128 GB SATA SSD (Intenso) about 3 weeks ago. Finally it is responsive again and usable. Using it as a scanning workstation. The 1 TB HDD had many reallocated sectors and makes many "click" sounds, so it was time to swap out.

 

[getrealbro]

...I guess now I am struggling with whether or not I should even bother upgrading to an external SSD boot drive to fix this problem or buy a newer Mac Mini. All I need it to do is run a Plex Media Server. Most of the time it will be headless.

What is your opinion on upgrades like this? Could I get another 3-5 years out of this Mini? I always wonder how the newer operating systems run on older Apple hardware.

I was pretty unhappy with the performance of my 8GB 2014 Mini w/ 1TB HDD, even when used as a headless file/media server. Until I installed an internal blade SSD

Late 2014 Mac mini is slow

I installed the Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD (and the other parts in the previous post) in my 2014 Mini this AM. The Black Magic speed test was as expected — roughly 750 MB/sec. And since it's internal, macOS supports TRIM :) This was “out patient” level brain surgery. It only took 2 hours to be...

forums.macrumors.com

Performance improved so dramatically, i added an inexpensive 1080p monitor so I could use it as a test mule BECAUSE…

The 2014 Mini has one major advantage over the 2018 Mini and other newer Macs — it does NOT have a T2 chip. So I can boot and run every macOS from El Capitan to Big Sur from an External drive (or SD card) without worrying that the latest macOS, Security Update or Beta will introduce problems with the T2 that I can’t fix. Read this thread to understand the issue…

Mac Mini 2018 Kernel panic bug_type 210 after Security Update 2020-002

Hello everyone, since installing the Mojave Security Update 2020-002 I do get a message that my Mac Mini 2018 was restarted because of a problem even I shut it down normally. The Mac Mini 2018 was running fine for 3 months. The Apple Hardware Check does not show any errors. Also tried to reset...

forums.macrumors.com

FWIW I recently used my 2014 Mini to do a clean install of Catalina, fresh installs of key apps, etc. for a friend who was waiting on delivery of a 2020 iMac. Once the new iMac arrived, we had it up and running fresh installs of critical apps in minutes by booting directly from the SD card. And once we knew everything was OK, we cloned the SD to the 2TB internal SSD. My 2014 Mini went back to running Mojave without a hitch. Doing the same thing with my 2018 Mini would have modified the T2 firmware.

As it stands, I’ll be keeping my 2014 Mini as long as I can keep it running.

GetRealBro

 

[phoenix-mac-user]

Every time I see this thread pop up I am reminded of my "2014 Mac Mini is Slow" story.

I bought the base 2014 Mac mini for my wife in 2016 because she needed a new computer. She only uses it for browsing and email so I thought it would be more than enough for her. I was running a 2009 Mac Pro at the time.

She immediately started complaining about how slow and awful it was and I was like "you're being silly, this is a brand new computer, there is no way it's slow". I did one time go to her computer where she already had a browser opened and typed in a URL and it came right up (not realizing it was the app load times that was causing the issues). It is very fast, I told her.

Finally after 2 months she stormed into my office and said "I'm going to Best Buy to get a different computer!". She was mad and started yelling about how I have ignored it for too long and she was done trying to work with it, she just needed a computer that worked. So I told her again there is nothing wrong with a computer that new, and I would temporarily give her my Mac Pro and take the Mini for myself to figure out what was wrong.

And it literally took me 15 minutes of regular use before I nearly lost my mind and realized the problem. So I started researching, replaced the SSD, and it was great, and I ended up giving it to my son for a year, and now my Dad uses it.

And that is the story of how the 2014 Base Mac Mini nearly destroyed my marriage.

(kidding, but she still doesn't let me live it down, and I will never be able to downplay a technical issue she has because she will say it is "just like the Mini").

 

[subjonas]

FWIW, I endured one of the worst computing experiences I've had in recent memory by rebooting into normal (non "Safe") mode so I could get VirtualBox installed. Over 30 minutes later, I barely escaped with this Disk Speed Test screen shot showing I could barely get half the performance out of the stock HDD when not in Safe Mode. Oh the pain. Oh the agony. Shame, Apple! Shame.

View attachment 951416

I’m wondering why people get such widely varying speeds with the stock HDD in the 2014 mini. How are some people getting 100 MB/s? I’ve only seen a few samples but this is the lowest I’ve seen (sorry about that haha). I saw a couple ~100 MB/s and a couple ~60 MB/s, including me. Someone mentioned disk fragmentation might be a factor, and not sure if that’s the case for you, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case for me since my performance has been about the same since I got it new, and the data has been pretty static.
Again, I’m actually not looking to increase performance for my uses. Just curious why some 2014 minis’ HDDs seem to be almost (or more than?) half the speed of others’ out of the box, at least in my case.

 

[Boyd01]

I don't understand it either. To me, 60MB/sec would be unacceptable for a new internal disk. The 500gb internal disk on my 2014 1.4ghz Mini and the 1TB disk on my 2014 2.8ghz Mini both clocked at 100MB/sec when they were new and continue to do so.