Thanks, but my externals are plugged in directly, no hub, and aren't set to ever go to sleep. It’s just a random thing that happens to all my externals from time to time (pretty rarely though), so it might just be something with my Mac.@subjonas
My bad for not seeing the 8Gb of ram. Yes, most of the beach ball is probably due to the slow 5400rpm. The 7200 rpm drive will help. If your external drives occasionally unmount, then I would look at
1, External drives on an underpowered USB hub or a problematic USB hub can unmount all by itself.
2, Don't set external drive to sleep via preference
3, Don't get an energy saving external drive that goes to sleep all by itself (some drives offer econo-mode)
I also run the Mac Mini 2011 as a server as well and I have 2 external RAID boxes hooked up to it. I used to get occasional dismounting, but after I removed the USB hubs and just plug 1/RAID box per USB and set the boxes not to sleep, I haven't had them dismount.
Hope this helps.
I don’t doubt that’s your experience, but that hasn’t been mine unfortunately. I use both external power and bus-powered drives.I have been running my 2014 Mini(s) as servers with two external USB drives for over 4 years. For three years before that, I used a 2012 Mini for the same thing. Never any problems with drives dismounting themselves. These are externally-powered desktop drives, not bus-powered units.
Anyway, while you have the machine open to replace the hard disk, you could put a small 128gb PCIE SSD in the empty slot and use it as your system drive, that would be very cheap and easy to do. It would give you basically what I have, and I don't get any "beachballs".
I’ll look into that small SSD option, thanks.