I recently purchased the Satechi USB4 Slim NVMe SSD Enclosure and equipped it with a Samsung 990 Pro 1TB SSD. Had a continuously blinking LED on the enclosure. Also, couldn’t eject the drive.
TLDR: Not the Satechi enclosure. Samsung Magician doesn’t support 990 Pro’s in external enclosures. When Magician was deleted (because it’s not doing any good anyway,) blinking light continued. Root cause: leftover user log in extensions from Samsung Magician. Disable those and no more blinking light and drive ejection function works fine.
Here’s the full experience. Enjoy!
Install went great. Works fine, then I noticed a couple of things.
Continuously blinking light on the enclosure, presumably indicating disk access. That drive stores applications that are large and seldom used, thus really shouldn’t have constant access.
An attempt to use Samsung Magician to see if there was a problem failed. Discovered that Samsung Magician doesn’t support 990 Pro’s in external enclosures.
OK, fine. So I uninstalled Magician because it was taking up room on my dock and it wasn’t doing anything anyway.
What made me dive into this is I took the enclosure to my OTHER Mac Mini and plugged it in. Light was steady. Logged out/in. Steady light. Restarted/logged in. Steady light. Which led me to believe it was a log in extension.
My hope is an update that occurred a year or so ago to address the early degradation problem is reflected in my device and that I can live without future upgrades. I do have an Intel Macbook Pro that I can use to get the firmware updates if necessary.
TLDR: Not the Satechi enclosure. Samsung Magician doesn’t support 990 Pro’s in external enclosures. When Magician was deleted (because it’s not doing any good anyway,) blinking light continued. Root cause: leftover user log in extensions from Samsung Magician. Disable those and no more blinking light and drive ejection function works fine.
Here’s the full experience. Enjoy!
Install went great. Works fine, then I noticed a couple of things.
Continuously blinking light on the enclosure, presumably indicating disk access. That drive stores applications that are large and seldom used, thus really shouldn’t have constant access.
An attempt to use Samsung Magician to see if there was a problem failed. Discovered that Samsung Magician doesn’t support 990 Pro’s in external enclosures.
OK, fine. So I uninstalled Magician because it was taking up room on my dock and it wasn’t doing anything anyway.
- OK, fine. But light is still blinking.
- Didn’t blink when I logged out. Started blinking when I logged in.
- Checked my login items and discovered in the extensions list two Samsung processes (I don’t have any other Samsung devices on my Mac) so I disabled them.
- Logged out waited until light went steady. Logged back in. Light is steady.
- For additional verification, restarted, then logged in. Light is steady.
What made me dive into this is I took the enclosure to my OTHER Mac Mini and plugged it in. Light was steady. Logged out/in. Steady light. Restarted/logged in. Steady light. Which led me to believe it was a log in extension.
My hope is an update that occurred a year or so ago to address the early degradation problem is reflected in my device and that I can live without future upgrades. I do have an Intel Macbook Pro that I can use to get the firmware updates if necessary.
