I had this issue when I went down the 2nd drive path of my mac mini. In my case, I wanted to add an SSD to the already apple hard drive.

I found that when I put the SSD with the iFixit sata cable into the 'extra' sata port in the mini, then ML wouldn't recognize it. I couldn't mount it or format it or anything.

BUT, when I put the SSD into the original 'first' slot, and moved the apple HD to the second 'extra' slot, everything worked just fine.

So, I suspect, that a new drive, and a new sata cable aren't compatible with some mac mini's in the extra port. And that if you want to use two hard drives, you'll most likely have to install the original drive back into the second port.

Hi,

i have the same problem. It seems that the cable 821-1347 doesn't work correctly with mac mini 2012 (late). The original part no. is 821-1501. There must be something different. I have found out, if you use the cable 821-1347 ssd hdds don't work correctly, if I use an old normal hdd (as a second drive), everything seems to be OK.

Well, same here... I installed a Samsung 840 (non-pro) 256GB using the iFixit-cable - the drive was recognized but if I try to create a new partition I get the error message: "Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed", whatever that means...

Now it's a bit unclear to me if I should change the drives in the bays. Even *if* the original 1 TB Apple drive would seem to work with the iFixit cable, shall I trust this drive/cable-combination? Would you?

Merry christmas from Berlin - Matthias

I also have this problem, not from this site, but I bought OWC dual drive kits.

Also I have Samsung SSD 840, not pro. Mac mini doesn't recognize the 840.

Did all kinds of stuff, tried different SSD (OCZ Vertex 2 -> didn't work either), tried different slot, reseated the cable, didn't work.

Because other drives didn't work, I suspect this is problem of cable at the moment.

I suspect I might be having similar issues. I bought two Samsung 830 Pro's to go with the new mac mini (late 2012 model). Used iFixit's cable for the secondary drive. Since I had no OS installed, I used recovery image to boot. Both drives were recognized. I proceeded to setup the two SSDs as a RAID1 disk and installed the OS on that. Everything was fine.

Then I noticed that every time I rebooted the computer, the same disk would be marked offline by the RAID system. Rebuilding the array and restarting would mark that same disk failed. Rebuilding in recovery mode would actually boot the system with both disks online, but some time later, that same disk would be marked offline.

Naturally, I swapped the two disks to see if it's a disk issue, or a controller issue, or a cable issue. After swapping the two disks - the problem persists, this time with the other disk. So at this point, I am looking at two possibilities - it's either an issue with the controller, or the cable. I am more inclined to think it's the latter...

It's the same for me. I have swapped the HDD and SSD and now everything seems to be OK. I purchased it from ifixit.

How can change the cable? I have to return to ifixit? I think that the shipment cost are big to perform this change....

Why iFixit do not perform tests on that cables before ship?

The price is not so cheap!!!

I hope for a speedy resolution of the problem for those that have the macmini 2012.

Let me known iFixit!

Regards

Marco

I wish we could get some confirmation on this from iFixit. It is a bit of an expensive endeavor to find out the real cause of the problem.

In addition to what I've said earlier - I have tried to plug in the two SSDs I have into an earlier model of MacMini (Mid 2011). Still using the cable I bought from iFixit. And everything was functioning properly. So, it is clear that the SSD are functional, and that the cable is functional. What is still unclear is whether the cable is incompatible with late 2012 models, or that the secondary controller on the Mini is faulty.

From what I gather - all of these parts should work with Mid2010 and later models.

I can say that I'm having this exact problem as well, brand new mac mini with two samsung pro 840s, whatever drive is installed on top seems to work perfectly fine, and any drive on the bottom seems compromised, causes disk utility to crash, and when formatted gives the error, "could not mount with name (null) after erase". I'm guessing the way to determine whether it's an issue with the cable itself or with the second sata port on the motherboard is switching the ifixit cable into the first sata port to see if that remedies the situation. I will try this later on today, if not -- what software issue could possibly cause this? It's unlikely that the second sata port on the new mac mini's would be different than the first, and when I contacted ifixit support, they said they were leaning towards this being a software issue....

Update

Bought a cable from OWC and that fixed my problem -- everything working 100 percent now.

Same problem here. Luckily, since I only plan to have 1 Samsung 840 256GB SSD while keeping the original 500GB HD, I did what others have done and relegated the 500GB to the secondary slot. It works fine now.

Hi,

I had a pre-formatted Samsung 830 drive that I added to my late 2012 mini. I added it in the 2nd bay, next to the stock hard disk, using the cable part referenced in one of the posts above. It was detected without an issue and has so far worked well, present when the mini woke from sleep. I will submit it to some endurance testing, running a VM off the disk for a couple of days and post an update here.

Just as an FYI, I had the same issues as described above (added SSD using iFixit cable and had cloned my OS to the SSD so was running off of it. I would get huge non-activitiy valley's then it would come back, then go out to lunch again...) After I removed the tape from the top drive and put my SSD on that one and my 1TB Apple drive on the iFixit cable all has been running great for a few months now. On my other (2011) mac Mini I have 2 SSD's and that's working perfectly.

Wonder if iFixit will send out updated cables to those of us who would want to use the SSD in the bottom bay...

I have exactly the same hardware, Mac Mini late 2012 and two Samsung 840 Pro SSDs and having problems too.

I got my SSDs installed fine and they're seen by Finder and Disk Utility but I can't use the other one. The system SSD works just fine but the other SSD can't be written to, because it causes errors all the time. Disk Utility shows that it produces a lot of UltraDMA CRC Errors whereas the system SSD has no errors at all.

Then I installed the original 1TB Apple disk as the other disk and it works just fine. So, SSD + HDD = works fine. SSD + SSD = Only one disk works.

Update: my setup is still working. Also replaced stock hard drive with ssd so now running a dual ssd setup.

I ran into the cable issue, too. Switching the drives and cables made it work, now. When I read the trouble some of you had, I thought that I had a different issue I had.

I just updated the Mac Mini 2012 i7 2,3 Ghz. I wanted to add the Samsung 840 Pro to the existing 1TB drive and have Windows 8 on the SSD via bootcamp and Mac OS on the original drive. Adding the SSD as additional drive with the ifixit cable worked well at first, but I was not able to get Windows or Mac OS to boot from the SSD, no matter what. Windows started installation alright, but could never survive the first reboot in install. For Windows 7 and 8 it showed "Disk Read Error". I tried all kinds of partitionings, I tried copying Mac OS via CCC - nothing was able to boot. The SSD worked fine and I got no errors other than when trying to make it bootable.

When I switched the drives, so that the Apple HD used the new cable and the SSD the old one, I was able to install and boot from Windows just fine. Booting into Mac OS from the original drive works as well.

Greetings from Bavaria!