Late 2012 Mac Mini with external SSD slow start up

[iMas70]

My kids are currently using my late 2012 Mac Mini with a 1TB hard drive and 500GB Samsung T5 SSD. It performed very well after I set up the SSD. Now it takes awhile to start up. it took 3-4 minutes for something to come on the screen when I turned it on a few days ago. The SSD has 51GB available and the factory hard drive is half full.

What do you think? There is a very good chance my kids will get my late 2015 iMac but I don't want to put this away to never be used again. I'd like to be able to send it to their Mom's house so they have an Apple computer there.

 

[sean barry]

Transfer some files from SSD to HDD now! Your SSD is way over jampaked

 

[Fishrrman]

You could try going to the startup disk preference pane, and re-designate the SSD as the boot drive.

 

[iMas70]

The SSD is the boot drive. There are three profiles on it. I'm going to go through what's on there to see if I can move anything over.

 

[enriquium]

My kids are currently using my late 2012 Mac Mini with a 1TB hard drive and 500GB Samsung T5 SSD. It performed very well after I set up the SSD. Now it takes awhile to start up. it took 3-4 minutes for something to come on the screen when I turned it on a few days ago. The SSD has 51GB available and the factory hard drive is half full.

What do you think? There is a very good chance my kids will get my late 2015 iMac but I don't want to put this away to never be used again. I'd like to be able to send it to their Mom's house so they have an Apple computer there.

Did you enable Trim? Maybe you used it for a long time without this enabled and reduced the lifespan of the SSD

 

[Boyd01]

AFAIK, you cannot enable Trim on an external USB SSD. I have a 2012 quad Mini that boots from a 1TB Samsung T3 that I use for video and audio editing. Has been working perfectly for over two years, takes about 30 seconds to boot.

Funny, I gave my daughter's family my old base 2012 Mini that was setup to boot from a 500gb Samsung T3. After a few months, they started having problems and ended up restoring from Time Machine backups a few times. Finally they gave up on it, and I gave them a MacBook Air. I am now using that T3 for other things and it's fine. I am pretty sure that the problems they had were related to a failing internal hard drive on that Mini, and that might also be your problem.

 

[iluvmacs99]

My kids are currently using my late 2012 Mac Mini with a 1TB hard drive and 500GB Samsung T5 SSD. It performed very well after I set up the SSD. Now it takes awhile to start up. it took 3-4 minutes for something to come on the screen when I turned it on a few days ago. The SSD has 51GB available and the factory hard drive is half full.

What do you think? There is a very good chance my kids will get my late 2015 iMac but I don't want to put this away to never be used again. I'd like to be able to send it to their Mom's house so they have an Apple computer there.

I had a similar experience with my 2011 Mac Mini but with an internal SSD, is when the SSD drive is near failure point is when it will do something like this. Had 2 SSD died on me on the Mini and twice, it took longer to boot to desktop. Might be a good time to back up whatever is in your boot drive like using Carbon Copy Cloner before it reached complete failure.

 

[iMas70]

I ended up getting my kids a new iMac so they should be good for years. The Mac Mini is in the closet. I'm trying to figure out what to do with that and the Thunderbolt Display it was attached to.