Why is my external ssd so slow / secure deletion before returning to Amazon

If you want to attempt to check the health of a drive you can try using DriveDx. You may need to install a special USB driver in order to attempt to access the external drive's health information. Unfortunately many USB controllers used by external devices do not allow the necessary communication to access the external drive's health information. It takes some practice to interpret an SSD's health report since not all errors indicate a bad SSD (at least not all the time).

Unfortunately DriveDx and other similar apps do not always correctly interpret the health of an SSD (not entirely the app's fault). It is best to manually review the heath information from an SSD. Unfortunately many NVMe SSDs contain only the most basic health information which may not show enough details to determine if there is a problem.

Many SSDs should have TRIM enabled especially when the SSD gets nearly full, but this is not possible with many external SSDs because the USB controllers used by the enclosure may not support TRIM. Plus I don't believe the TRIM feature of macOS works for external SSDs (at least that is what I've seen mentioned by a few contributors on the Apple forums). If TRIM is not an option for an external SSD (or even an internal SSD), then you just need to unmount the volumes on the SSD, but leave the SSD connected and powered on so that the SSD's internal garbage collection routines have time to work. Unmounting a volume using the Finder won't work since it is also "ejecting" the drive which can disable power to the drive. Instead you may need to use the command line to unmount all volumes on the SSD.

As others have mentioned, macOS Monterey is known to have some compatibility issues with USB3 drives although macOS 12.1 has supposedly resolved some of the issues for some people and drives.

As others have mentioned, there is no need to use any proprietary software to manage an external drive. You may lose access to certain features of an external drive such as built-in hardware encryption, but there are other software based options you can use to encrypt the data on an external drive.

Personally I would not recommend using the APFS file system on an external data drive since APFS is still quite new and is still experiencing growing pains (use HFS+ instead, aka MacOS Extended). First Aid is unable to repair many APFS issues and there are no third party utilities available to repair an APFS volume which means if First Aid is unable to repair the volume, then you will need to erase the drive and restore the files from a backup. Also keep in mind that First Aid will lie to users about the true health of the file system scan so make sure to click "Show Details" even if First Aid says everything is "Ok". Manually scroll back through the report to see if any unfixed errors are listed. If there are any unfixed errors listed, then you will need to erase the drive and restore the files from a backup.

Good luck with the replacement SSD.

If you have not installed ALL of the latest updates to Monterey, do that. Apple has been working to fix the I/O issues.

I do not know about Sandisk, but Samsung has a history of needing special drivers to work with Mac. When you upgrade MacOS, the special drivers can stop working and you are stuck looking for a fix. OWC and Crucial make drives that work easily with Mac not needing special drivers. WD has a checkered history for me with "all-in-ones" ... they can put middle-quality drives in middle-quality enclosures and the entire kit can fail within 2 years taking all of your data with it.

OWC sells high-quality "on-the-go" enclosures that you can swap many high-quality drives into.

SSDs have their own unique set of issues due to their structure. Some report that an SSD that sits unpowered long enough will "forget" all of its contents.

I suspect it is a one-off issue. But you are also partially correct I think ... using 75% of the drive stressed block-management. That "buffer zone" can be as big as 10% of drive space, which more seriously stresses space management.

As to "use their special software" ... When the MacOS changes the special software may fail as well, so stick with drives that know about Macs already. OWC (macsales.com) and Crucial make drives that "just work with Mac easily".

Keep a backup of any critical data, including this "data sifting" drive. Yes ... drive backing up drive backing up ...

Others may answer in the next few hours with more wisdom.

Happy computing!

steve359 wrote:

Samsung has a history of needing special drivers to work with Mac. When you upgrade MacOS, the special drivers can stop working and you are stuck looking for a fix.

yes, but the same can be said about most every manufacturer's drives. that's why i never use software from any manufacturer, and instead i use disk utility to erase and format all my external drives (HDDs and SSDs) before putting them into service. FWIW, i've not encountered any issues with my samsung T7 SSD, which i use to boot into catalina when i need to. i erased and formatted it APFS before installing the macOS on it.

I have had similar issues using a Sandisk SSD. I longer use them and stay with Samsung or WD.

I would avoid Samsung as well. Even Samsung engineers are at a loss to explain why their devices have issues.

Here is an enclosure from OWC (macsales.com) that is a high-quality enclosure(https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MOTGS3U3/), and you can find high-quality bare drives to swap in. Crucial and OWC sell Mac-ready drives that fit.

Well, you must be lucky for 6 to have no misses. But I have read enough "MacOS upgraded, now my Samsung is not usable" posts with the answer being to get a new device-driver shoehorned into a boot-drive.

I am sure we all are advising based on personal success with a solution, as we should. The OP will decide ultimately.

I had a WD "all in one" that stopped working. I extracted the drive thinking I could re-use it, but it was useless without the controller card it came with. Only a reformat of the drive would make it usable again.

While I would use a Samsung if necessary with some level of concern, I would use an all-in-one with GREAT concern over the fact it will likely be a middling-quality drive in a middling-quality (if not fully proprietary) interface.

I use high-quality enclosure and select high-quality drives, and only fully-dead drives have caused issues.

steve359 wrote:

Well, you must be lucky for 6 to have no misses. But I have read enough "MacOS upgraded, now my Samsung is not usable" posts with the answer being to get a new device-driver shoehorned into a boot-drive.

I am sure we all are advising based on personal success with a solution, as we should. The OP will decide ultimately.

I have Samsung T5 and T7 drives, formatted new from the box with Disk Utility (used for a while HFS+, but now on APFS for use with Monterey), no third party firmware or disk utility tools installed or used with them, only Disk Utility. They have been used on Catalina and Big Sur and Monterey laptops. I have found these drives to be superb, no glitches, and very fast. I have trouble measuring the speed they are so fast, the T7 has approached close to 1000 MB/s, which is remarkable, I can backup an entire TB size computer from scratch in less than 20 minutes.

Of course we are all telling our anecdotal experiences. But on Amazon, there are more than 13,000 user ratings of the T7 and the average rating is 4.8 out of 5.

I have 6 Samsung SSD's all EVO series and no issues with any of them across three different Mac's.

I agree I never use any drivers/software from the supplier. I always format myself.

I always format and use the SSD in my own enclosure which may make a difference.

SSDs behave differently from HDDs. HDD can rewrite/overwrite/erase without issue right up until death. SSD has limited number of writes-per-datablock before it goes dead ... thousands of writes, yes, but a limited number. To help with this an SSD sets aside a notable section of the drive as "idle" and swaps active blocks for idle blocks.

It is possible the active-for-idle swap became inefficient due to a shortage of usable idle blocks, and needed a complete reformat to decide what was still usable.

Can you still use it ... your choice I guess. If Amazon is not demanding it back, try using it for light duty until you think you can trust it.

EDIT: A format of an SSD will scramble the block-linkages sufficiently without a "complete write of 0s to the entire drive". In fact, writing 0s to all blocks actually can hurt by filling the write buffer of the SSD to "choking" level, and burns some of those block-writes.