I inherited a 2014 Mac mini. It has upgraded to OS X Monterey. In that OS, the spinning beach ball of death has returned. For whatever stupid reason, Apple soldered the RAM to the logic board, so I am stuck with 8 GB RAM for this i5 processor.

OWC has a SSD replacement drive, which takes a fair amount of mechanic work to install. They also sell an add-on PCIe SSD, simply a circuit board with a ribbon cable, which affixes to some screws present inside the case. This is very easy to install, in comparison. You don't remove the existing HDD.

Would a second drive as the SSD, configured to be the boot drive, with the OS X there, be a good solution for application speed and the spinning beach ball? If I choose the 1TB model, I could use the internal 1TB HDD as the Time Machine backup disk.

This would free up the two mini-display ports for displays, rather than one being an external Time Machine.

quote:

Originally posted by 4MUL8R:
I inherited a 2014 Mac mini. It has upgraded to OS X Monterey. In that OS, the spinning beach ball of death has returned. For whatever stupid reason, Apple soldered the RAM to the logic board, so I am stuck with 8 GB RAM for this i5 processor.

OWC has a SSD replacement drive, which takes a fair amount of mechanic work to install. They also sell an add-on PCIe SSD, simply a circuit board with a ribbon cable, which affixes to some screws present inside the case. This is very easy to install, in comparison. You don't remove the existing HDD.

Would a second drive as the SSD, configured to be the boot drive, with the OS X there, be a good solution for application speed and the spinning beach ball?

Maybe, it depends on what the machine is doing that is causing the delay. Have you confirmed that the system is hanging on disk accesses, or constantly swapping? If it is not, then speeding up the disk accesses will do little or nothing to eradicate the beach ball, although other aspects of system performance might get a boost.

quote:

If I choose the 1TB model, I could use the internal 1TB HDD as the Time Machine backup disk.

Yes.

Please, please, please if you go ahead with this, please report results in this thread.

I thought about doing just what you are asking, using an external SSD drive as the OS hard disk, for exactly the same reason. I have two of the exact same 2014 Minis you speak of, one for me & the other for the wife. My research on replacement was that using them externally would slow the speed to whatever the connecting cable speed was limited to. I couldn't find real answers to if that made a difference, but I did watch a lot of youtube vids about replacing internally. And that is exactly what I ended up doing on both. I watched several different videos looking for ones where people made mistakes so i could see what not to do. Lots of the vids seem to only show how easy it is, and it is, but there are a couple places you can pull a ribbon plug wrong and screw things up. I bought both the tool kit and SSD drives from OWC.

Ultimately it was less than 15 minutes start to finish on the first one and I think I did the second one in under 5 minutes. No more spinning balls, no more browser crashes, no more apps crashing, boot up time is less than a minute.

Longest part was restoring from Time Machine Backup.

I was not clear on the PCIe second drive...it is INTERNAL, sits just below the WiFi antenna panel as installed, and is connected directly to the logic board via PCIe bus. So, no cable speed worries.

My head tells me I would rather have the PCIe second drive, and the original HDD as the Time Machine.

"Maybe, it depends on what the machine is doing that is causing the delay. Have you confirmed that the system is hanging on disk accesses, or constantly swapping? If it is not, then speeding up the disk accesses will do little or nothing to eradicate the beach ball, although other aspects of system performance might get a boost."

I don't know how to confirm the system issues. My viewing of Activity Monitor only showed a Firefox browser as the main user of the CPU. Of course, that's what I use the machine for. Are there ways to monitor the machine condition that are useful and able to be invoked during the SBBOD?

It's not clear to me whether you intend to use the original drive for Time Machine, leaving it in the Mac mini, or removing it and putting it in an external enclosure.

If you're thinking about leaving it inside the mini, you would be giving up some of the advantage of a Time Machine backup. If the smoke Leakes out of the mini, or if the mini is stolen or physically damaged, your backup is gone. Pfffft.

You mentioned getting the SSD from OWC. They have a good selection of external enclosures. Put the old drive in one of these, connect it for Time Machine backup, then put it in a safe place.

PCIe NVMe drives are vastly superior to SATA SSD and SATA spinning drives.
IF you can make the transition and your computer supports it then I would recommend the PCIe.

I would not remove the original HDD. All my base belong to us...I mean, all my files are in the iCloud. So, Time Machine would be a remotely possible need, but not a primary need. I have four external SSD inside enclosures already, so I don't need to use the internal HDD as an external drive, and I'm trying hard to NOT have to take apart the entire Mac mini any way. I am trying so very hard to eliminate all those dongle-length cables to external SSD.

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Originally posted by 4MUL8R:
I'm trying hard to NOT have to take apart the entire Mac mini any way.

I've taken apart a 2011 and a 2018 Mini, the 2011 to swap a spinner for an SSD, and the 2018 to add RAM. While it does take a bit of time, if you use a good guide like those from iFixit, and be careful with a couple of fragile connectors, it is not hard at all. iFixit also sells the mini tools you will need at very reasonable prices. These are tools not normally found in a homeowners toolbox, like a T5 security torx driver. The best tool they sell is called a spudger. It's a plastic sort-of pry tool that makes it easy to encourage parts to move safely.

Not sure of the economics in the Mac world.

How does the cost of getting a 2022 model compare to the costs of upgrading your inherited 8GB 2014 mode? If it's comparable, I'd consider replacement vs. upgrade.

RE: using an internal drive as your backup (Time Machine) if you upgrade. That's an entirely other topic, but as V-Tail mentions above, having the backup on the same physical computer it's backing up wouldn't give a great deal of protection.

I decided to reformat the HDD and reinstall the OS X Monterey. The mini came from a large church, and I didn't know the history of it. The reimaging of the HDD took a while. Downloading Numbers, Keynote, Pages, etc. took a long while. I found the DNS values were wrong, and changed them to help with the download speed. I just went away for a while, and everything finally settled down.

Since them, the machine is quite different, in a good way. No spinning beach balls. I can hear a lot of HDD activity, when I change applications. Activity monitor shows no real demand on CPU or RAM. So, I suspect the HDD is the only slow item.

I realized that spending $250 on a SSD would be silly, as joel9507 noted, given the cost of a truly new M1 Mac mini. So, I think the prudent course of action would be to repurpose one of my external SSD to this mini, and to swap the HDD for the SSD one cold winter day.

Update...the HDD was, as it turns out, quite slow. There were spinning beach balls, fewer than before reformatting, but still unacceptable. I mean, who am I to wait for a few seconds?

I had a 1 TB SSD on hand. A new SSD would cost about the value of the machine, and about one-third of a new Mac mini. So, I took the mini apart and stuffed the SSD in its bay. It took about 1:45, including the time I spent making a "tool" out of a wire coat hanger so that I could pull the logic board out of the case.

Another 90 minutes, and I have a freshly formatted SSD with Mac OS X Monterey. It runs great, even with only 8 GB RAM. Time well spent.

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Originally posted by 4MUL8R:
Time well spent.

I agree. I've replaced spinning drives in two MacBook Pro fairly recently, and the change has made a tremendous difference. I'm glad you got your Mini working well now.

quote:

Originally posted by 4MUL8R:
For whatever stupid reason, Apple soldered the RAM to the logic board, ...

A large percentage of their service work was for incorrect or improperly seated ram modules. Using soldered ram has eliminated this. I would also suppose that soldering ram is cheaper than incorporating a ram slot and then buying ram on a separate pcb.

The internal fusion drive on my 2017 iMac 27 died so I am running on two external 2 TB SSD's. They are the fastest available USB-C, but not Thunderbolt. Speed is fine, and I added a couple 16 GB sticks from OWC a while ago for a total of 40 GB (left the two original 4GB sticks in there) It's not really needed but if I'm buying memory sticks I always get the biggest that will work in the machine.

I may get around the tearing the thing open and replacing the internal drives. The 128GB PCIe board still works but is buried inside and requires almost complete disassembly. The dead SATA drive is a bit easier to replace, after removing the screen. Apple's Fusion drive for this model year is just the PCie and SATA merged logically by the OS. After two spinning drives failed within a short time of each other (the other the 3TB disk in my Time Capsule) I am only going to use SSD's from now on.

I am thinking about moving to an M1 Mac Mini and getting a separate thunderbolt monitor when I upgrade. I'd rather tear apart a mini to replace something that have to use a small plastic pizza wheel to cut through the adhesive on the edge of the iMac screen and then pull it off with suction cups to get inside. It's not a terrible job, but if you screw up and break the screen you are not going to replace it for less than the entire machine is worth.