Mac mini 2012 won’t boot

[adamcarvell]

inventory is mac mini 2012 i7 8gb ram i have various old drives and nas for storage the OS X is now on the samsung t7 1tb drive no fans running since this new drive installed which is a bonus. the factory fitted 256 ssd is not showing so I'm assuming died. but I'm happy with is so far until i either get newest mac mini or iMac sometime next year.

 

[adamcarvell]

internet recovery wouldn't let me install onto the drive as it had firmware on it but I've gt it up and running can't tell much difference to factory fitted one tbh. Was slower to boot up

 

[adamcarvell]

Question the t7 ssd do I leave it on all the time like I did before with my Mac mini or should I shut it down more often?.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Question the t7 ssd do I leave it on all the time like I did before with my Mac mini or should I shut it down more often?."

During the day, either let it sleep, or just use a screensaver or perhaps turn the display off.

At night, shut it down.

 

[Boyd01]

I always have my Mini's set to never sleep, except for the display. Then I just shut them down at the end of the day. Never had any problems in several years of running my 2012 Mini from an external SSD this way. However, over the years there have been a variety of threads about external disks dismounting when the Mini sleeps. I wouldn't expect that to happen when the external is actually the startup disk, but you will probably have to try yourself to be sure.

 

[adamcarvell]

I usually leave it on and turn the monitor off sometimes it won’t wake up monitor gets no signal message I have to reboot it.

 

[Fishrrman]

I'm thinking that if you're booting from an external drive, that if you "put the Mini to sleep", it may also "loose contact" with the USB bus (and connected devices)... thus creating problems when you want to "wake things up".

I booted and ran my 2012 Mini from an external USB3 SSD for six years.
I had the "sleep" setting set to "never".
I had a display sleep setting which would activate the screen saver when I shoved the pointer to the upper-right-hand corner.
This worked well enough for me.

Sometimes, if I'm going to be away for more than a short interval, I'll just "reach forward" and TURN OFF the display, but leave the Mini alone.

 

[Boyd01]

Sometimes, if I'm going to be away for more than a short interval, I'll just "reach forward" and TURN OFF the display, but leave the Mini alone.

The "hot corners" option in System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver is also a handy way to accomplish this. You can pick one of the corners and choose "put display to sleep" from the drop-down menu. Then if you move the mouse to that corner, the monitor will turn off.

OTOH, it can also be annoying when you inadvertently move the mouse there.

 

[adamcarvell]

I’ll try those ideas. Pleased with it so far I used to o get fans going and beach balls new drive seems a bit quicker or I’m imagining it. just set it up to sleep never and use the hot corner to turn the monitor off.