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Question on Mac and external drives

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Phonzoxd

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 28, 2013
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I was reading elsewhere with no real confirmation, but ill ask here.

Since i am buying the new Mini with 512GB which is obviously not enough space and will need a external drive.

I was reading that having an external drive plugged in full time is not a good idea. When the Mac goes to sleep, it disconnects or something and can corrupt the drive. Is this true?

i want to just keep it plugged like and treat it like an internal drive.
 
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Phonzoxd said:
I was reading elsewhere with no real confirmation, but ill ask here.

Since i am buying the new Mini with 512GB which is obviously not enough space and will need a external drive.

I was reading that having an external drive plugged in full time is not a good idea. When the Mac goes to sleep, it disconnects or something and can corrupt the drive. Is this true?

i want to just keep it plugged like and treat it like an internal drive.
Click to expand...
That only happens if there’s a major bug with the hardware you choose, and I believe there was a weird issue with early M1 Macs that Apple fixed with a software patch where disks would get ejected in sleep. A good quality drive or enclosure will be just fine, and I haven’t seen anything about Mac’s having issues with sleeping drives in at least a couple years.

You should definitely be good to go!
 
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stiligFox said:
That only happens if there’s a major bug with the hardware you choose, and I believe there was a weird issue with early M1 Macs that Apple fixed with a software patch where disks would get ejected in sleep. A good quality drive or enclosure will be just fine, and I haven’t seen anything about Mac’s having issues with sleeping drives in at least a couple years.

You should definitely be good to go!
Click to expand...
Huge relief. Looking to buy a 4tb ssd and a thunderbolt enclosure this month. Probably BF.

May even change my config to 256gb then. Mull it overnight
 
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Thunderbolt 3 enclosures are in general good, as long as there is cooling.
'Thunderbolt 4' enclosures are electronically a mix of TB3 and USB4, and not so standardised, so cheap ones have had problems, reported in this forum.
The more mainstream the manufacturer probably the better the reliability...
 
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Phonzoxd said:
Huge relief. Looking to buy a 4tb ssd and a thunderbolt enclosure this month. Probably BF.

May even change my config to 256gb then. Mull it overnight
Click to expand...
Just for the system and applications, I’d keep at least 512GB so your system as plenty of breathing room, personally. Depending on what apps you use 256GB can go really fast.
 
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That is incorrect. I have 2018 (intel) 256 GB Mac Mini (running Sequoia 15.1 developer beta) with external 4 TB SSD enclosure (r/w speed of about 2,700 / 2,400 MB) as the OS volume.

I ordered Mac Mini M4 (16 GB / 512 GB) but will be using 4 TB external SSD. I will be storing all Apps on the internal drive and store all data on 4 TB external SSD.
 
On my M1 Mac mini, I have my 700 GB Photos Library on an external SSD, a USB-C 3.2 10 Gbps Samsung T7 Shield.

It works fine >95% of the time, but very occasionally it gets disconnected at sleep, giving me that error on wake. Photos loads fine and seems to work fine again when it reconnects, but I've noticed that Photos occasionally stops syncing with iCloud after this happens. It doesn't tell me there is an error. It just stops syncing. However, if I reboot, it will sometimes re-analyze the database and then will start syncing normally again to iCloud. It's not a deal breaker, but it's still annoying because I have to remember to check Photos, and reboot if necessary.

Because of this, I thought for my next Mac mini (M4) I would get a drive big enough to house my entire Photos Library. However, since I'm already using 200+ GB for other stuff, add a nearly 700 GB Photos Library, and even a 1 TB drive isn't big enough. Unfortunately, a 2 TB drive from Apple is WAY too expensive.

So instead I will just get a 512 GB internal drive and continue to use external SSDs, with the knowledge that occasionally buggy behaviour can occur.

haralds said:
I have three TB drives on my M1 Studio and they stay mounted. I have seen USB drives disconnect on sleep. I have not tested USB-C.
There is an app "Jettison" that can overcome this.
Click to expand...
That's interesting. My drive above is USB 3.2 not Thunderbolt.

I will next try a USB 4 drive, and since the USB 4 is basically Thunderbolt. Hopefully this will correct the disconnect problem.

BTW, Intel says this:

"Both Thunderbolt™ 4 and Thunderbolt™ 3 technologies are compatible with the USB4 specification, allowing users to use Thunderbolt™ 4 and Thunderbolt™ 3 products with USB4 ports."

However, the reverse of this is not strictly true. I was looking at the OWC 1M2 USB 4 enclosure and if you connect it to an Apple Silicon Mac Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4 port, it will give you the full 40 Gbps speed. However, if you connect it to an Intel Mac Thunderbolt 3 port, it behaves like a basic USB-C drive and drops down to USB 10 Gbps speed. I'm told by experts here like @AAPLGeek that this is a peculiarity of that specific OWC enclosure, and not a limitation of its ASM2464PD chipset, but nonetheless, weird things like this do occur when mixing and matching USB 4 and Thunderbolt ports and devices.

Nonetheless, I will try to see if a USB 4 enclosure solves the problem.
 
I have usb ssd plugged into my mbp and never remove it. The machine pretty much stays on my desk full time now. Whether it’s booted into macos or windows the ssd works fine. The machine goes to sleep on its own but I never shut it down. Still, I make backups in case any of the storage devices fail.
 
I have a M3 Mac Running 15.1.1 and recently got a high-end 4TB SanDisk. It disconnects every time my Mac sleeps, and causes full system lockups. It is a MAJOR HEADACHE and I wish I knew how to fix it.
 
@fil512 "I wish I knew how to fix it."
Connect the external SanDisk SSD to a Thunderbolt 3 dock (not TB4 as they work differently).
That way the dock controls the SSD, not the Mac.
Any cheap TB3 dock (even a used one) with a JHL7440 (Titan Ridge) controller will work best.
 
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