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Level 1

52 points

Monterey struggling with External SSD

I had meant to add this to another tread but can't now find it - not even in Safari History.. Basically since upgrading to Monterey my MacBook Pro can't connect correctly to external SSD.

This is the text I was going to add to other thread.

When I connect my Seagate Fast SSD Media 1Tb which has two partitions one APFS and the other Mac OS Extended Journaled, the OS Ext mounts instantly but the three containers of the APFS take for ever. When I finally managed to open a folder in and APFS container and tried to open it, it threw the Finder into a nervous breakdown which could not be Relaunched via Force Quit. Disconnecting the drive brought Finder back to life. I tried on another port on my MacBook Pro 2016 and tried a different cable but all to no avail. Connected drive to iMac running Big Sur and all works fine. I was tempted to reformat the Max OS Ext to APFS but will wait a while and no great urgency.

Posted on Nov 1, 2021 3:28 PM

Best reply

Maggot

Level 2

209 points

Posted on Nov 21, 2021 8:46 AM

KRisseeuw wrote:

1. I had several issues with external USB drives, Disk Utility and Time Machine on a new MacBook Pro M1 Max with Monterey 12.0.1.

USB3-drives are not properly recognized. Time Machine does not work.

2. USB-C drive did not work with either Time Machine or Disk Utility (see below).

Today I purchased a new SanDisk with USB-C connection to make a proper Time Machine backup. The Disk mounted, but Time Machine did not work, nor could I erase the drive with Disk Utility. I tried everything I knew, called Apple Support, but nothing worked (safe mode didn't work).

Workaround: I could solve it by using a Mac Mini 2018 with USB-C-Port, running MacOS Big Sur. Here the external SSD could properly mount and erasing + partitioning worked within 30 seconds. After this treatment, the drive worked well with my new MacBook. Time Machine backups worked fine after that.

Deducting from this, I see that it is not a hardware issue as much as a software issue, affecting both Time Machine and Disk Utility. I am guessing it has to do with MacOS Monterey.

The workaround as highlighted above solved it for the moment.

How on earth is this marked “solved”? The issue — Monterey has hosed compatibility with many, but not all, USB-C external drives — persists, even for KRisseeuw.

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Monterey struggling with External SSD

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