Mac Mini Fusion drive

[RabidGranny]

Evening All

I've been offered a Mac Mini with a Fusion drive? How reliable are these drives? Its a 2014 model and for £50 might be a no brainer but want to know what length of time id get out of her/ie what's the experience of such drives here?

The plan would be to bump up to the latest os with Opencore.

thanks in advance

[sjg]

It's just flash / SSD and a spinning hard drive, combined in software. MacOS automatically shuffles commonly used stuff to the SSD and less used to the HD so in theory you get SSD performance but without the high cost of large capacity storage.

Reliability will be entirely down to the drives inside it - if it's run for 10 years it may well continue to do so but if either drive fails you're stuck. Keep stuff backed up with an external drive and Time Machine and at least it's easy to restore.

My wife had a Mac Mini of that era, we bought it with just HD and added a SSD and set it up as a fusion drive. They're not the easiest to work inside but if a drive did die you could cheaply replace with a bigger generic SATA SSD and get up and running again. A 1TB SSD is about £45 these days.

[mmm-five]

It's got to be worth a punt for £50, surely?

It won't be fast as it'll have a 4th gen dual-core (4 thread) i5 or i7, and this age of Mini was the first to have the RAM soldered on the board (so it's not user upgradable).

Just hope it's not the entry-level 1.4GHz i5, as that was a waste of silicon even when it was new.

Edited by mmm-five on Tuesday 17th September 16:20

[Teppic]

£50 for a Mac Mini, even a 2014 model, is a no-brainer.

If you're going to go down the OpenCore route you may as well replace the Fusion drive with an SSD before you start.

Edited by Teppic on Tuesday 17th September 16:20

[RabidGranny]

mmm-five said:

It's got to be worth a punt for £50, surely?

It won't be fast as it'll have a 4th gen dual-core (4 thread) i5 or i7, and this age of Mini was the first to have the RAM soldered on the board (so it's not user upgradable).

Just hope it's not the entry-level 1.4GHz i5, as that was a waste of silicon even when it was new.

Edited by mmm-five on Tuesday 17th September 16:20

nah its a 2.8. thanks for the heads up though.

[RabidGranny]

Teppic said:

£50 for a Mac Mini, even a 2014 model, is a no-brainer.

If you're going to go down the OpenCore route you may as well replace the Fusion drive with an SSD before you start.

Edited by Teppic on Tuesday 17th September 16:20

why?

[Teppic]

RabidGranny said:

Teppic said:

£50 for a Mac Mini, even a 2014 model, is a no-brainer.

If you're going to go down the OpenCore route you may as well replace the Fusion drive with an SSD before you start.

Edited by Teppic on Tuesday 17th September 16:20

why?

Reliability and speed, mainly. The fusion drives are more prone to failure than an HDD or SSD. Fusion drives present a merged volume container between the SSD and HDD. Without either one, the data is unreadable. Basically if either the SSD or HDD part fails, your entire data is basically gone forever.

Plus if you upgrade to the latest OS via OCLP and then decide at a later date that you want to replace the fusion drive with an SSD, then you've got to go through the whole OCLP process again.

Utlimately it's up to you if you do stick with the Fusion drive or replace it, but for me personally replacing the Fujsion drive with an SSD would be the first thing on my list.

Indeed it was the first thing I did on a 2012 MacBook Pro that I obtained. As it was going to be a fresh install of MacOS I decided to remove the HDD, put in an SDD (had to replace the ribbon cable connecting the drive to the motherboard as well) and get the messing about with OCLP out of the way. Yesterday upgraded it to MacOS Sequoia as well, which was just updating OCLD to v2.0.1, installing the macOS Sequoia update and then running the root patches from OCLP.

[RabidGranny]

Teppic said:

RabidGranny said:

Teppic said:

£50 for a Mac Mini, even a 2014 model, is a no-brainer.

If you're going to go down the OpenCore route you may as well replace the Fusion drive with an SSD before you start.

Edited by Teppic on Tuesday 17th September 16:20

why?

Reliability and speed, mainly. The fusion drives are more prone to failure than an HDD or SSD. Fusion drives present a merged volume container between the SSD and HDD. Without either one, the data is unreadable. Basically if either the SSD or HDD part fails, your entire data is basically gone forever.

Plus if you upgrade to the latest OS via OCLP and then decide at a later date that you want to replace the fusion drive with an SSD, then you've got to go through the whole OCLP process again.

Utlimately it's up to you if you do stick with the Fusion drive or replace it, but for me personally replacing the Fujsion drive with an SSD would be the first thing on my list.

Indeed it was the first thing I did on a 2012 MacBook Pro that I obtained. As it was going to be a fresh install of MacOS I decided to remove the HDD, put in an SDD (had to replace the ribbon cable connecting the drive to the motherboard as well) and get the messing about with OCLP out of the way. Yesterday upgraded it to MacOS Sequoia as well, which was just updating OCLD to v2.0.1, installing the macOS Sequoia update and then running the root patches from OCLP.

Thanks man. so does sequoia run well on it??

[Teppic]

RabidGranny said:

Teppic said:

RabidGranny said:

Teppic said:

£50 for a Mac Mini, even a 2014 model, is a no-brainer.

If you're going to go down the OpenCore route you may as well replace the Fusion drive with an SSD before you start.

Edited by Teppic on Tuesday 17th September 16:20

why?

Reliability and speed, mainly. The fusion drives are more prone to failure than an HDD or SSD. Fusion drives present a merged volume container between the SSD and HDD. Without either one, the data is unreadable. Basically if either the SSD or HDD part fails, your entire data is basically gone forever.

Plus if you upgrade to the latest OS via OCLP and then decide at a later date that you want to replace the fusion drive with an SSD, then you've got to go through the whole OCLP process again.

Utlimately it's up to you if you do stick with the Fusion drive or replace it, but for me personally replacing the Fujsion drive with an SSD would be the first thing on my list.

Indeed it was the first thing I did on a 2012 MacBook Pro that I obtained. As it was going to be a fresh install of MacOS I decided to remove the HDD, put in an SDD (had to replace the ribbon cable connecting the drive to the motherboard as well) and get the messing about with OCLP out of the way. Yesterday upgraded it to MacOS Sequoia as well, which was just updating OCLD to v2.0.1, installing the macOS Sequoia update and then running the root patches from OCLP.

Thanks man. so does sequoia run well on it??

It seems to run OK so far. No issues encountered, but early days as I only updated it yesterday.

[ZesPak]

At 50 quid for a working computer it's worth a shot.
As others said though, never trust a single storage solution and especially don't trust a spinning one.

[RabidGranny]

Morning All

By way of update, the mini has been set up etc with OCLP etc and seems to run ok.

That said, I see new M2 models for 500gbp or cheaper online. Im tempted. Is it worth the upgrade for someone who does only emailing youtube MS office tasks with what i have currently?

[mmm-five]

RabidGranny said:

Morning All

By way of update, the mini has been set up etc with OCLP etc and seems to run ok.

That said, I see new M2 models for 500gbp or cheaper online. Im tempted. Is it worth the upgrade for someone who does only emailing youtube MS office tasks with what i have currently?

Depends how much value you place on having an up to date OS and being able to use all the 'special' technologies in MacOS 15.

Yes, it will be faster (3-5 times according to synthetic benchmarks), but how much faster it will feel to you is difficult to say.

If you can, get to an Apple Store / Currys to try one in person.

Don't forget that some older Intel only software may not run at full speed (due to the Rosetta 2 translation going on) on a Mac Silicon machine...and newer versions (as always) add more bloat.

[blackscooby]

I fitted an SSD to a Mac Mini i5 (2011 A1347) and it transformed it from a slow piece of useless tech, to a very useable (if outdated) piece of kit, this one was earlier and had user replaceable memory slots, so it also had 16Gb installed.

[RabidGranny]

mmm-five said:

RabidGranny said:

Morning All

By way of update, the mini has been set up etc with OCLP etc and seems to run ok.

That said, I see new M2 models for 500gbp or cheaper online. Im tempted. Is it worth the upgrade for someone who does only emailing youtube MS office tasks with what i have currently?

Depends how much value you place on having an up to date OS and being able to use all the 'special' technologies in MacOS 15.

Yes, it will be faster (3-5 times according to synthetic benchmarks), but how much faster it will feel to you is difficult to say.

If you can, get to an Apple Store / Currys to try one in person.

Don't forget that some older Intel only software may not run at full speed (due to the Rosetta 2 translation going on) on a Mac Silicon machine...and newer versions (as always) add more bloat.

yeah so i run sequoia OCLP on this with an SSD and it seems to run ok. seems slow on startup but after that seems fine. So im not sure