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Announced on October 16, 2014, identifiable by the model number A1347 and EMC 2840.

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M.2 SSD - how is it used?

Hi,

On the late-2014 Mini, I successfully swapped the existing 1TB HDD (HGST 5K1000) with a 500GB Crucial SSD. Before I did so, I installed BigSur on the then external SSD.

Only when opening the device I realized that there was a M.2 drive installed. I left it in after the swap.

Everything works but the M.2 SSD seems not to be used. Partitions on it are not recognized. The device shows with it’s hardware name only in Disk Utility, with 120GB), therefore I assume that together with the HDD, it formed a Volume Group (“Fusion Drive”?) which is broken now. Can anybody confirm this?

My understanding is that with the Crucial SSD, it is no longer of any use otherwise. Now my Question: is it save to remove the SSD or just reformat it as a second drive?

Thanks…

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Your systems specs: Mac mini (Late 2014) Review the storage details.

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It was not first-hand, so I do not know about any modifications before.

What I saw was this:

- Mac Mini late-2014

- 8GHz Dual Core i5

- 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3 (was 4GB, I upgraded to 8)

- Intel Iris 1536 MB

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@effbee23 - I was focused on your drive options.

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The blade SSD is a custom Apple unit it is not an M.2. Here’s more on it The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs

And yes the 128 GB SSD was part of the Fusion Drive config your system was originally setup with. The SSD was used as a cache drive to the HDD (not visible). Using Disk Utility you can wipe it down and set it up as a regular drive.

Presently you’ve setup you're 2.5” SSD as the boot drive (not using the blade in any way) If you reformat it you could install your OS onto it as well as your most important app. You want to leave at least 1/2 of the drive empty so your OS and Apps have room for caching, paging, virtual RAM and scratch space.

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