Mac Mini EtreCheck Report - Failing HD

The stock 5400 rpm drive is old, worn out, slow and prone to failure. If you are going to run the later macOS's on your 2014 Mac Mini, then it really needs to be upgraded to an SSD.

There are several of ways to go about upgrading to an SSD and/or using an external SSD.

1. Upgrade it to an SSD yourself using the iFixit and/or OWCmacsales guides.
2. Contact your local AASP and have then upgrade it to an SSD.
3. Get or build a good quality external USB 3.0 with an SSD.

For example, here are some EtreCheckPro report clips from your 2014 and my upgraded 2012 Mac Mini to compare.

Please note the extremely low Write and Read speeds of your hard drive. A good 5400 rpm drive should be around 70 to 80MB/s and this is why the EtreCheckPro is reporting the drive as failing.

To confirm the hard drive failure you can run DriveDX. If DriveDX shows any "Failures" or "Warnings", then it means the drive is bad or worn out respectively. EtreCheck is reporting a drive failure because it took it 12 minutes to run when it should only take a couple of minutes. The hard drive is most likely failing. Regardless I would recommend upgrading to an SSD as it will greatly improve system performance. We've had no problems using the Crucial MX500 series SSDs in many of our Macs (stay away from the BX500 series).

You should definitely make sure your data is backed up now. If you don't have backups, then start backing up. This is even more important when using an SSD since an SSD can fail without any warning signs and data recovery from an SSD is nearly impossible.

You really should upgrade the memory in your Mini since 4GB is really not enough to run the newer versions of macOS. If you decide to upgrade the memory, it is recommended you purchase it from Crucial or OWC making sure to use the tools on their respective websites to identify the specific parts which are guaranteed to be compatible with your Mini.

den.thed wrote:

The OP Mikey has a Late 2014 Mac Mini with fixed RAM and the only upgrade option is an internal or external SSD.

Thanks for catching my mistake with the fixed RAM. I was distracted by the unknown characters when reading the report.

HWTech wrote:

EtreCheck is reporting a drive failure because it took it 12 minutes to run when it should only take a couple of minutes.

Recent versions of EtreCheck now have a direct hard drive performance test. It tests read and write performance on some largish contiguous blocks. It considers values under 40 Mb/s to be failing, generally speaking. It also has a file system performance test where it creates and moves a bunch of small files and directories. The idea is to simulate the normal, but convoluted process of saving a document. A file system test time of about 30 seconds is normal. All tests will time out after 120 seconds, which is really bad.

There are various mitigating factors that could be involved. A high level of nominal I/O is going to reduce performance. Good read/write speeds with poor file system speeds probably means some software interference from antivirus or sync software.

Overall report runtime could be a factor too, although this is less important than it used to be. The overall run time is based on how long it takes to run all the various lower-level Apple tools. Normally this is 3-4 minutes. Sometimes things like flaky external drives or corrupt systems or corrupt caches could lead to a very long runtimes.

I’m not sure what is going on with these new reports that are showing up as inline “attachments”. I have seen that before, but not always with corrupted characters. Sometimes people don’t just copy and paste. Instead, they will route the report test through any number of funky document formats.

Hi,

Try to check your internal HDD with FirstAid of DiskUtility if it reports something.

The OP Mikey has a Late 2014 Mac Mini with fixed RAM and the only upgrade option is an internal or external SSD.

Awesome, you’re welcome!