Monterey struggling with External SSD

Hello everyone, I just finished downgrading to Big Sur after I almost lost all of my data stored on external hard drives :( Luckily I managed to recover the data but this is not part of this thread.

I have a Mac mini (2018), i7. After the upgrade to Monterey 12.3.1(from Big Sur 11.6.4) my external 4TB hard drives would start making problems until they did not mount at all any more (not even visible in disk utility when connected). After some research I found that I am not the only one with this issue. Long story short: DONT UPGRADE TO MONTEREY! Everything was working perfectly fine before the update. Apple needs to solve this issue. Now after downgrading to Big Sur 11.6.5 everything works again as expected. Its definitely a major bug that can result in huge data loss!

I had exactly this problem with a Seagate mobile drive; went into Recovery and erased/partitioned multiple times, it worked for a few days then back to the same problem. I finally ditched the Seagate as I had read of others with the problem, and purchased a Best Buy inexpensive drive (made by WD) , used Disk Utility to format and partition, and haven't had an issue since.

It seems the problems has been ironed out with Monterey 12.4 update. At least at my end. Utterly slow LaCie Mobile SSD seems to be back to the usual speeds after the update.

Hi moondav,

Thank you for the update. It does sound like you are making good progress. Based on your experience with the LaCie and SanDisk drives with macOS Monterey, it appears the issue may be with the Seagate drive. It may be worthwhile to copy the data from the Seagate to one of these drives, erase the Seagate and format it without adding partitions.

Keep us updated on your progress.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

Doubt it. The interwebs are littered with people who have had issues with peripherals (mainly external drives, often connected via USB-C) that struck immediately after installing 12.0.1. From mount issues to slow downs, the install of Monterey is the root cause.

Apple Support will likely tell you that your drive has failed, and that this is entirely coincidental to the update. Do not believe them.

My experience: 2020 iMac (Intel, not M1 or M2), connected to two G-DRIVE mobile USB-C externals, one used for Photos (2TB) and the other used exclusively for Time Machine backus (4TB). The only differences aside from size is that one was manufactured in 2019 (2TB, astill working fine) and the other, a 2020 build, is hosed. (Except that it's not hosed: it works erfectly when I hook it p to my son's 2016 MBP running Big Sur.)

There have been various "fixes" floating about, most of which I've tried. But this is an Apple-related screw-up, and won;t likkely be solved without their intervention in an iterative update to Monterey. Apple owns this, and needs to address it. If you merged all the threads on this forum, and the Apple Developer forum, you'd likely have several thousand unhappy customers — many of whom, like me, purchased their now useless external drives through the Apple Store.

Ramt over,

Maggot

My external 2TB LaCie SSD slowed to a crawl after updating to Monterey. It then (I thought) failed. I sent it back to Seagate...... anyway, long story short..... The drive has returned, formatted to ExFat - and worked perfectly. I reformatted to APFS and it again slowed to a crawl (3 MB/s on Blackmagic) ...... I reformatted back to ExFat - note: this can take about 20-30 minutes - and now works perfectly again..... 500 MB/s on Blackmagic...... Dunno what the problem is - Apple or Seagate (or both) - but I hope this helps someone else....... Format as ExFat.

To update the drive's firmware go to the drive manufacturer's support site and look for the instructions for updating firmware.

Usually you need to download a utility from the support site as well as the firmware update. Some manufacturers only have a utility for a PC and in that case you have to connect the drive to a PC to update its firmware.

mariafromdarlington wrote:

Can you tell me how I update the drive’s firmware please?

Yes they are very helpless, lol.

they tried and fixed mine for a moment through unmounting and remounting the disk in startup mode, I believe. Finally I accidentally plugged the drive straight in through a usb-c adapter and I haven’t had anymore problems. I’m just having to work around my hub because that seems to be what Monterey isn’t supporting with to some of my drives.

if you’re in a pinch and using a hub, try bypassing it.

Ive transferred the data and formatted the drive to fps. It seems to be working much better now

Good afternoon moondav,

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities!

It sounds like you are having issues accessing data on a partitioned external drive, and we'd like to help.

If we understand your post correctly, the MacBook Pro you are using is a 2016 model that has been upgraded to macOS Monterey. The Seagate Fast SSD Media external drive with the APFS and macOS Extended Journaled partitions connects and opens on the iMac with macOS Big Sur as expected.

In case the issue is with the Seagate drive, do you have the files on that drive copied to another location?

Is it possible that one or more of the files you are trying to access are corrupt? Try choosing a different file to open to test.

Do you have a different external drive formatted with APFS that you can connect to your MacBook Pro 2016 to determine if you have the same issue with Finder and opening files on that drive?

The resource below will provide some guidance:

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

If the issue persists, please reply to this thread and we'll do our best to help you!

Take care.

I have a similar issue and the Apple help desk advised me to disconnect the Seagate Fast SSD (2T).

Trying to do a Time Machine back up was impossible, it kept on indicating that it was "looking for the back-up disc" (Keep in mind this same SSD drive worked without a problem in Big Sur).

Indeed this Seagate is not found by the Monterey OS and the Mac was not capable of shutting down the normal way. I had to unplug the SSD.. Once this was done all went well.

The Apple Engineer told me that this was a known issue and they are working to resolve this..(May be wrong or no Seagate drivers were installed.)

I might add that the install of the Monterey was no issue on my iMac Pro and my wife's 21.5" iMac and both have SSD back up drives but NO Seagate.

.The Monterey install on my 21.5" iMac stalled at that 80% load progress.. Had to restart in safe mode and got Monterey finally installed. However could not turn it off etc.. That's where the removal of the Seagate SSD came into play.. Once removed all went well..

Just wanted to share my experience...

I have an OWC Mercury Electra 6G 480 GB SSD inside a Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive enclosure. It is formatted as APFS and works fine on Big Sur on my iMac. It also worked fine under Big Sur on my 2016 (13") MacBook Pro. Since updating the MacBook Pro to Monterey, however, the drive refuses to mount. The device shows up in Disk Utility, but the Container won't mount and the device is unresponsive. I have the same enclosure with a WD750 GB mechanical/spinning drive in it. It mounts fine. My other portable drives, which are also mechanical drives work fine. I see over on MacRumors that many people are experiencing trouble with connecting devices through USB Hubs on Monterey. Which, of course, is exactly how I am connecting these devices. That said, the 6 different Memory sticks I own all connect fine through this hub. The only thing that doesn't work is the SSD drive named above. I'm convinced this is a bug in Monterey.

I'm also experiencing this issue, which has rendered my 2TB external LaCie SSD (model: LRD0TUA) unusable. 😡

The following are the symptoms that I've experienced:

• It takes an unusually long time to mount or unmount the external volumes.
• Disk Utility is unresponsive while the external volumes are being mounted or unmounted.
• Finder and most applications are sometimes unresponsive for a few minutes after I boot macOS (presumably while macOS is automatically mounting the external volumes).
• It sometimes takes an unusually long time (over 30 seconds) to open files that are stored on the external volumes.
• It sometimes takes an unusually long time for Time Machine backups to complete.
• While using a virtual machine that is stored on one of the external volumes, the virtual machine frequently becomes unresponsive.
• It sometimes takes an unusually long time to write small files to the external volumes using a command such as `dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/LaCie/test bs=4096 count=2`.

I've noticed that the issue seems to affect write operations to a far greater extent than read operations.

I was hoping that the issue would have been resolved in the latest beta version of macOS 12.1 (build 21C5039b), but I was disheartened to discover that it wasn't. I was fairly certain that the issue began after I upgraded from macOS Big Sur to macOS Monterey, but, to exclude the possibility of a hardware fault, I installed macOS 11.6.1 (Big Sur) onto a separate volume. The issue didn't persist. (What a surprise! 😒)

Over the past few days I've spent many hours performing tests and writing a detailed bug report on the issue. Apple should now have all of the information that is required to fix it.

Okay, further to my earlier post. I have now taken the OWC 480 SSD that I had in a Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive enclosure and transferred it to another portable drive enclosure. It now works fine on Monterey. I also tried hooking it up to another USB 3.1 controller and a USB 3.0 controller and it worked fine on each of them. So this seems to be an incompatibility with particular drive controllers/chipsets.