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My Mac Mini was taking forever to boot up and would not respond once booted. I found out in recovery mode that it has severe SMART issues on the Fusion drive. I need some advice on what should be the best replacement option. I am thinking if it is the HDD, replace it with a SSD of similar size or larger and go from there, or just replace the SSD, if it is bad. From what I’ve read so far, replacing the HDD is not a huge improvement, but I’d like to increase the size from 1TB to possibly 1.5 or 2 TB.
Your SSD is much smaller than your HDD. I’m going to guess your HDD is failing. Replacing it with a new drive. I would recommend going with a hybrid drive (SSHD) like a 2.5” Seagate FireCuda. Or, if you want go with a 2.5” SSD but its going to be more expensive than a HDD or a SSDH drive Mac mini Late 2014 Hard Drive Replacement You’ll first need to break the Fusion Drive set following this guide first How to split up a Fusion Drive. I would remove the blade SSD as its so small its quite useless. If you want some real performance you’ll want to upgrade it to a larger drive and make it your boot drive. Here’s a good reference on these drives The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs and here’s the guide Mac mini Late 2014 SSD Replacement Using a 128 GB or 256 GB blade drive will offer a huge perforce gain and then you can have the HDD for your deep storage. This is the best long config gaining the best of a dual drive (not a Fusion Drive).
