The End of a Mac mini

Hardware
1

A few weeks ago my mid-2011 Mac mini started randomly beach balling across all applications. The only way I could get it back to normal was to hold down the power button and force a restart. Last week it escalated to randomly restarting itself (saved me the trouble of holding down the power button, I guess :smile:). These random restarts persisted after a nuke and pave, and even cropped up when I was booted into the recovery partition, so Iā€™m pretty sure itā€™s a hardware issue.

Eventually it got to the point where the mini would sometimes restart before it even got through the boot cycle and displayed the login screen. I reluctantly concluded this problem was fatal (or at least not worth spending a lot of time and money to fix in a 7 year old computer).

Thinking back on this troubleshooting process, one thing that strikes me is the dog that didnā€™t bark. I have enough backups that I really had no concerns about loosing data: Time Machine, a hard drive clone that runs every night, and for the things I used this computer for, everything important was in the cloud anyway. If Iā€™d waited until things got bad before trying to backup I would have had a very difficult time. Towards the end it wasnā€™t running long enough between random restarts to get a lot of data off of it. Backups save the day again.

7 years is a good long time and while having it go down like this is a pain I feel like I got my moneyā€™s worth out of this machine. It served as my main home desktop, a headless server, sat on the shelf for a while, then got resurrected with an SSD and pressed into service as a secondary desktop at work. Iā€™m very thankful that it didnā€™t die until after the new 2018 Mac mini was released. If it had died a year ago when the mini hadnā€™t been updated in years I really would have had some difficult decisions to make about how (and whether) to replace it.

As it is, this is a problem I could solve with a visit to the Apple website; Iā€™ve already got a new 2018 Mac mini on the way.

The Mac mini is dead, long live the Mac mini.

5 Likes
2

This situation is not only a good reminder warning for people with older computers, but for anyone with an SSD.

I canā€™t remember where it was recently posted, but someone talked about the fact that SSDs will die a lot more ā€œquietlyā€ than old spinning drives did.

It used to be that you could literally hear a hard drive having problems, and that might be a sign that something was wrong.

With an SSD, there will not be much, if any, of a warning. It will work right up until the moment it doesnā€™t.

So, as always, make backups before you need them because you never know when you might need them. It could be tomorrow.

1 Like
3

And see them. I used to replace heads on hard drives (the size of a dishwasher and with 50MB capacity).

But to the point, we donā€™t know that the SSD was at fault, and their failure modes arenā€™t always instant and unrecoverable death. Sometimes they shift to a read-only mode, sometimes they flake out.

more here

4

I would reseat all the connectors (including the memory sticks). A very common cause of random gremlins are bad connections. And doing this costs you nothing if it works.