I can say that I'm having this exact problem as well, brand new mac mini with two samsung pro 840s, whatever drive is installed on top seems to work perfectly fine, and any drive on the bottom seems compromised, causes disk utility to crash, and when formatted gives the error, "could not mount with name (null) after erase". I'm guessing the way to determine whether it's an issue with the cable itself or with the second sata port on the motherboard is switching the ifixit cable into the first sata port to see if that remedies the situation. I will try this later on today, if not -- what software issue could possibly cause this? It's unlikely that the second sata port on the new mac mini's would be different than the first, and when I contacted ifixit support, they said they were leaning towards this being a software issue....
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== Update ==
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Bought a cable from OWC and that fixed my problem -- everything working 100 percent now.
I can say that I'm having this exact problem as well, brand new mac mini with two samsung pro 840s, whatever drive is installed on top seems to work perfectly fine, and any drive on the bottom seems compromised, causes disk utility to crash, and when formatted gives the error, "could not mount with name (null) after erase". I'm guessing the way to determine whether it's an issue with the cable itself or with the second sata port on the motherboard is switching the ifixit cable into the first sata port to see if that remedies the situation. I will try this later on today, if not -- what software issue could possibly cause this? It's unlikely that the second sata port on the new mac mini's would be different than the first, and when I contacted ifixit support, they said they were leaning towards this being a software issue....