Extra Hard Drive in Mac mini has disappeared

[RickyB]

Not sure if this is the correct forum, but this problem seemed to appear after I installed Catalina security updates yesterday.

I have a 2012 Mac mini with a 525 Gb SSD startup volume and a 1 TB SSHD drive (with a 8 GB cache I think) which I am currently using for extra space. It is also installed internally using this:

Installing Mac Mini Late 2012 Dual Hard Drive Kit

Use this guide to install iFixit's Dual Hard Drive Kit in your Late 2012 Mac Mini.

www.ifixit.com

I use the SSHD for my Music and Photo libraries as well as storing various other files. I do have a Time Machine backup of it and looking at it, it was updated yesterday morning before the update.

I have restarted the Mac but it has had no effect. Disk Utility does not show it, neither does the storage section of System Information.

There are two entries in the SATA/SATA Express section of System Information. One is the SSD I mentioned, the other gives me this:

Intel 7 Series Chipset:

Vendor: Intel
Product: 7 Series Chipset
Link Speed: 6 Gigabit
Negotiated Link Speed: 6 Gigabit
Physical Interconnect: SATA
Description: AHCI Version 1.30 Supported

Unknown:

Native Command Queuing: No
Detachable Drive: No
Bay Name: Lower

Is this the SSHD I mentioned?

I can open up the Mac mini but is there anything else I should try before I do this?

Thanks!

 

[RickyB]

It is now showing up in Disk Utility as uninitialised. When I try to initialise it I get:

Erasing “ST1000LM014-1EJ164 Media” (disk4) and creating “Untitled”

Unmounting disk
Creating the partition map
Unable to write to the last block of the device. : (-69760)

Operation failed…

So I think that's it - even if I somehow did get it working again it wouldn't be reliable.

I think I'll get an external drive which I can continue using when I upgrade to the M1 mini which I will do at some point.