The internal hard drive looks good although the transfer rate listed is a bit low even for a slow Apple drive, but I've never really looked at those values except for assisting on these forums so I'm not sure what is considered normal. My guess is something else is affecting those numbers since it took a long time for the original EtreCheck report to run.
Have you run Disk Utility First Aid on the internal drive?
Since you have several external drives connected to this computer it is very likely one of those external drives is causing a problem especially since your original post mentions I/O subsystem and SCSI/USB. To make sure the computer itself is working fine you should disconnect all those external drives including any hubs to see if the problem occurs which would at least tell you the issue is with the Mac or macOS. Then you can test each drive individually.
If these external drives are connected to a hub, then I would suggest connecting the drives directly to the computer since the quality of many hubs is quite poor these days.
If these drives are connected directly to the computer, then try using a good powered USB3 hub with UASP support which may provide more power to the drives and also the hub will act as a buffer which may help make everything work more reliably.
ksaro1 wrote:
<DriveDX Report.log>
Initially DriveDX reported the external USB drives couldn't be scanned because they required a 3rd party driver, which I wasn't going to install just in order to diagnose a Mac OS issue, as obviously the OS doesn't require the drivers for a kernel panic.
However, when I then ran DriveDX to produce the attached report, DriveDX no longer shows the external USB drives? They are mounted and shown in Finder and Disk Utility. Odd.
To access the health information on the external drives requires a different type of communication than normal data transfers and unfortunately Apple does not have this support built into macOS so a special third party USB driver is necessary to allow the necessary communication to access an external drive's health information.
USB sticks cannot be tested since they do not have any built-in health checks.
Unfortunately even with this special USB driver there is no guarantee DriveDX will be able to communicate with the external drives since the manufacturers of the external drives do not always allow the necessary communication to pass through (usually limited by the USB controller on the external drive). There is no other way to check the health of the external drives from within macOS unless the manufacturer provides their own utilities to do so. In that case I would trust the DriveDX USB driver over the proprietary software provided by the drive manufacturer (especially when you have multiple brands of drives), but that is just me.
I do not blame you for not wanting to install extra software especially a third party driver. I also try to minimize what is installed on my own systems so I really do understand.
It is possible to boot from a Linux Live USB drive to attempt to check the health of the external drives if you don't want to install a USB driver on a Mac. I use this method a lot when working on other people's computers.