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Hi, I purchased a dual hardrive kit for my Mac Mini late 2012 model from iFixit. I had an SSD on the upper bay connected to the motherboard with the original Apple cable that came with the Mini and a HDD connected to the motherboard with the iFixit SATA cable. The SATA cable worked perfectly in that setup. I recently upgraded the HDD with an SSD and now I get constant read/copy errors like Error 36. I have tried to reformat the drive and also used the ‘‘Dot Clean’’ terminal command to fix it but with no luck. When I connect the same SSD with a casing via USB, it works perfectly well. The only problem that could occur is with the iFixit SATA cable. Do you have a fix for it or do you recommend another SATA cable from your store? Thanks Update (07/02/2019) Replacing the upper sata cable has solved the problem. There was no damage to the cable. It was the one with the number 821-1347-A which apparently works only for HDDs. You need the faster 821-1501-A for an SSD to run well. The mac mini is up and running successfully with dual SSDs. Thanks for the help! :)
One of the problems you can encounter is the cable breaks down which can cause errors when the I/O is heavy. Often times the folding of the cable is the issue as many people put a hard fold (putting in a crease) into the cable which you don’t want and that damages it. I fear you’ll need to replace the cable and this time you’ll need to handle it a bit better. What I do is use a BIC pen ink straw (or a bamboo skewer) to help me shape the arc of the radius for the places the cable needs to bend around the corners. I would recommend you replace both cables as it not easy to tell which one is failing: Mac mini A1347 (Mid 2011-Late 2012) Lower SATA CableMac mini A1347 (Mid 2011-Late 2014) Upper SATA Cable Once you get the cables replace I would strongly recommend you backup the drives and reformat them both so you know you don’t have any file corruptions present and then restore the files from your backup. I would first setup an OS installer on a USB Thumb drive How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive. I don’t recommend going to the newer MacOS’s on SATA based systems as they alter the file system from HFS+ to APFS. While it is a better file system for SSD’s its not good with SATA based drives! Basically, you give up two to gain one type of problem.
