Just wanted to thank all of you who helped me thru what for me was a very scary problem (both int/start-up and ext/back-up drives giving failure warnings at the same time) and give you a final update. I think I got it all done w/o any loss of files or data. Here’s where I’m at:
1) Both my original int & ext drives have been reformatted & now appear to work perfectly.
2) I put a new WDC 1T SSD in as my main/start-up drive. I’m using the original Samsung
500mb SSD (the orig. main/start-up drive) as a second internal drive used simply as a
“copy” disk (with Super Duper) to keep an actual copy of my main drive (WDC). This way,
either drive can be used as a start-up disk.
3) I now have two external back-up disks:
a) the new SanDisk Extreme Portable 2T SSD;
b) the “old” Seagate 2T HDD.
4) All four drives are formatted Journaled HFS–GUID Partition. Somewhere along the line, I was thrown by an article (think it was Apple.support) that said Mojave uses the Apple File System (APFS), so I thought I needed to convert because it was newer, therefore better. But not mandatory and, if I’m correct, Mojave must use Journaled in order to work with Time Machine.
ONE PROBLEM: While everything now appears to be working well, I still have the original EtreCheck reports showing SSD too slow-SSD is showing poor performance??? Think it might be due to a runaway app–Dictation. Have posted a new thread titled “Dictation problem. com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore.speechrecognitiond 82.40 % (Apple)”.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Terry