Chosen Solution
I bought a Sandisk Extreme II 500GB SSD with an the Mac Mini dual drive kit. The installation went well and the SSD drive was recognized by my Mac Mini, well… some of the times. Sometimes it didn’t mount and I had to open Disk Utility to mount it manually. Sometimes Mac OS X (10.9 Mavericks) says that the drive is not initialized and asked me to format it, only to do so again the next time I boot. When the Sandisk SSD is recognized by Mac OS X, it works great, but I don’t trust it enough to put any serious data on it right now. I thought something was loose so I did installation again. Same problem. Interestingly Windows 7 in Bootcamp had no problem with it, recognized it every time. Does anybody run into the same problem?
There are a few different possibilities here: Apple (and some third parties) had a bad run of SATA cables. So it could be a simple issue of replacing the cable. The other issue is the SATA I/O speed - Here you may need to check your systems firmware. Review this Apple TN" EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Macs make sure you have the newest for your system. In some cases the handshake between the drive and the system didn’t work if you have an auto sensing HD/SSD. You also may want to check your SSD’s firmware as well here. Lastly, some models of Mac Mini have an issue with the optical drive’s SATA port. While this OWC note is about MacBook Pro it also holds true with the mini’s OWC Data Doubler it makes no difference who’s unit you buy here. Note the Special compatibility notes at the bottom. Because of the issue we only use fixed SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drives.
Turns out it’s a bad SATA cable. When OS X recognizes the SSD, I could measure speed of around 250 MB/s. That’s not the performance level of the Sandisk Extreme at all. So I bought a $20 SATA 3 to USB3 enclosure, slot the SSD in, and instantly saw speed of around 450 MB/s. Now I’m booting off the USB enclosure. I can order a replacement SATA cable from iFixIt, but what can guarantee that it will work this time?
