Monterey struggling with External SSD

I've noticed a couple of things that might narrow the domain of the problem. I have another 4TB SSD in a Sabrent USB 3.0 enclosure. It was formatted with APFS (NOT Case Sensitive) on Big Sur. It is connected directly to one of the (late 2013) Mac Pro's USB Ports. I use it for my Music library. It seems to be working perfectly fine (and is being used rather heavily). So I think the direct USB connection is a problem for Disk Utility erasing/formatting the external SSD drive and subsequent Time Machine updates. I tried APFS (NOT Case Sensitive) and Time Machine seems to force the backup drive to be APFS (Case Sensitive) for the first backup. So, this may be specific to formatting and writing to an APFS (Case Sensitive) external SSD with a direct USB connection using Time Machine or Disk Utility.

The issue is Monterey (on M1) with external SSDs partitioned to APFS. All my drives (regardless of brand) have terrible writing speeds on M1 Monterey with the APFS filesystem. Apple should address it and provide an update that fixes it. There's no other way.

Makeshift solution is to run your external drives on HFS+ to bring the write speeds to about 80-85% of the total ssd speed claimed by the manufacturers.

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!

So I bought an IF-Certified Thunderbolt 4 Cable as one user suggested here for my External SSD, and updated it from BigSur to Monterey, unfortunately, still it takes like 5 minutes to boot. Tried clean installing monterey but nothing changed. I guess it has something to do with monterey being uncompatible with the drives or the enclosure. Reverted to BigSur for now, and my iMac boots in about 30 seconds.

Hope Apple is aware of the issue and fixes this.

Sooo..if you are like me and have been stressed and searching for a month, finally got my old externals to work. Tuxera has updated to finally be compatabke with Monterey. Installed…bam! Now my externals and jump drives are mounting and working perfectly! Funny thing is that apple support still doesn’t get there’s a problem 🙈. They have a 15 day trial- hope it helps, because it has been a stressful month not finding a solution lol!!

Same here - still same problem but I have been able to determine which models of SSD seem to be effected. I have some 2 year old Sandisk Extreme 1Gb drives and they all suffer from the same problems everyone has reported. I also have a Sandisk Extreme Pro 2GB which is a faster drive and does not seem to have the problem. I have also got - Crucial X8 SsD which so far seems ok.

Spoke to apple again today and what’s disturbing is that the senior engineer did not seem to be aware of the problem.

Sandisk also seemed surprised but did say they would escalate to level 2.

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.

Exactly what I’ve observed. Drive is terribly slow and often refuses to format in the default method. Sometime manually unmount followed by formatting with DOS Fat 32 followed by APFS works and the drive runs fine for the remainder of that session. Couple of days later is playing up again. Just can’t trust those drives for important backups. Maybe we need to start feeding back which makes models and versions work and don’t work. Purchasing a replacement is a total lottery.

I assume it’s not a drive problem but a partition problem with usbc. I have 3 identical ssds, which 2 are APFS and one HFS+. The speeds I get with the HFS+ formatted ones are closer to what advertised. BOTH the APFS ones write speeds are worse what I’d get with mechanical drives…

I have exactly the same problem with two Samsung SSD (One that I just bought yesterday). Is a shame that a lot of people have had this problem for a long time and still have no solution.

Apple is losing one of their most important value. Confidence that your machines work or that solutions to problems come quickly.

I hope everyone is leaving feedback and starting a support call with Apple. There must be a limit to the number of times Apple can pretend nobody else has reported the problem.

I have also opened a ticket with Sandisk about my specific issue.

I apologize there has been a misunderstandment. I thought you where the person that had poor perfomance issues.

In any case, here is my internal SSD structure:

Where did you get the info about compression not available when using an APFS drive? This is what I get when I compress a folder on a APFS formatted drive:

Where did you get the info about compression not available with APFS? This is what I get when compressing a folder of other folders/files:

Something wrong. You should just see your main ssd and the 2 Monterey volumes.