Mac Mini (late 2012) extremely slow

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Level 1

11 points

Mac Mini (late 2012) extremely slow

Hey!

I have a Mac Mini late 2012 that is running extremely slow. Everything takes forever. Sometimes it even takes seconds to show the folders listed after opening a Finder window.

First I thought the reason is just that my Mac Mini still has a HDD hard drive and Sierra and Catalina are not made for this kind of drive, however, I think that this slowness is not normal. One cannot work with such a machine.

I saw a related post in this forum with a similar issue (Mac Mini as well) and an EtreCheck was run. I also installed EtreCheck and received the following report

EtreCheck log

I don't really know what is meant with "Failing hard drive". Is my hard drive broken? If so, how can I tell what is corrupted and whether it's possible to repair the issue?

I also ran the First Aid Option with Disk Utilities. However, no error was reported.

Best regards,

Alex

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 9, 2019 10:41 AM

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Answer 1

den.thed

Level 10

95,200 points

Dec 9, 2019 12:19 PM in response to _-Alex-_

It may or may not be failing?

The biggest problem that I see, is that is is nearly full

and working on the slowest part of the already slow 5400 rpm HDD

which is most likely why EtreCheckPro thinks that it is failing.

In retrospect, the EtreCheckPro report for my Late 2012 Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM and an SSD is 1000% better.

My EtreCheckPro Report

If you are now considering an SSD upgrade for your Late 2012 Mac Mini....?

see > https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/mac-mini/2012

and > https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Mac_Mini_Late_2012

I'm not selling PNY SSDs, but I have been using PNY SSD to upgraded Mac Mini's and iMac's for 5+ years now and all turn out excellent EtreCheckPro stats and are in good working health as we speak.

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Answer 2

_-Alex-_ Author

Level 1

11 points

Dec 11, 2019 10:25 AM in response to den.thed

Thank you very much for your reply!

So I guess at the end, I won't be able to avoid changing the hard drive if I want to speed up things.

Before I'll do that, would clearing space on the HDD also help in the meantime? Or what did you mean with "it's working on its slowest part". What differences are there?

Best regards

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Answer 3

dwb

Level 7

33,326 points

Dec 11, 2019 11:09 AM in response to _-Alex-_

The rotational 5400 RPM drive is your mini's main speed bottleneck and the read and write speeds for your mini are exceptionally slow. That's why the EtreCheck report thinks your drive is failing. A failing drive will require multi attempts to successfully read/write data which makes for slow thru-put. In your case the very first thing I'd do is back up the hard drive.

Disk Utility's Disk First Aid doesn't test the media itself, it checks to see that the catalog is healthy. But if you launch Disk Utility and click on the I icon at the top left it will open an information window. Scroll down to the very last item: SMART status. SMART is a set of industry (semi) standard diagnostics that constantly run and can help assess the health of the hard drive. Your drive either passes or fails. The one drawback to SMART is that your drive may show that it passes, and fail 2 seconds later. But if it shows your drive failed, you can be sure it will shortly fail.

den.thed and I are incomplete agreement about the SSD being a huge improvement. After installing it you'll think you've gotten a new computer, the improvement will be that dramatic. I have no experience with PNY but I would recommend staying away from Samsung. Personally, I prefer Crucial Tech and macsales.com drives.

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Mac Mini (late 2012) extremely slow

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