High-capacity mobile SSDs (8, 10, 12, 14, 16 TB) from China have flooded the external HD storage market dirt cheap. But none of them compatible with Apple devices. All of them ExFAT formatted, which cannot be overridden (to APFS) or erased (and reformatted) with Apple Disk Utility (you get error messages). Does anyone know how to get around this reformatting issue? Thank you.
iMac 27″, macOS 12.6
Yes, it is disappointing that SSD capacities have been taken so long to increase in size. Five years ago, QLC NAND was suppose to help by offering larger SSDs and lower prices, but QLC NAND has not really taken off. It doesn't help that QLC NAND is much slower than even the already slow TLC NAND, but QLC NAND is much less resilient as well, just like TLC NAND is less resilient than the former MLC NAND.
Keep in mind those SSDs may not even be real SSDs. I have seen so many reports where many of the unknown SSDs flooding the market may be fakes. Sometimes they will take parts from other SSDs cobble them together. Other times they will take a real SSD and flash their firmware to make them appear to be larger SSDs, when in fact they are much smaller SSDs.
Here is one article on the cheap fake Chinese SSDs flooding the market and I have seen others as well:
I really like this post on a thread on Tom's Hardware where a person was asking about fixing the reporting of a fake drive size of a Chinese SSD as it sums things up very well:
FYI, you do need to be careful with how you utilize SSDs. SSDs cannot be used reliably for long term storage where the SSD is stored away on a shelf for archival purposes. An SSD requires having power applied to it once in a while to keep the NAND memory cells refreshed and the data intact. While an SSD manufacturer told me that it usually takes a couple years for the data to deteriorate, I have seen some reports this has occurred in as little as six months without power. Plus SSDs are much more susceptible to power fluctuations and issues as well. Most of the SSD failures I have personally seen with our organization's computers have not failed due to becoming warn out, but due to the SSD's controller failing so that the SSD no longer could communicate with the computer meaning the data could not be recovered (maybe an expensive data recovery service could recover data, but we never tried since it was never needed because we had backups).
I would definitely prefer having my backups on a standard hard drive since backups don't require a fast drive after the initial backup has been made. Of course restoring a backup from a hard drive will be slower. It is always a good idea to have multiple backups through different methods and media.
I personally would not touch those Chinese SSDs even if you paid me. If something seems to good to be true, then it usually is too good to be true. It is usually a scam. The main manufacturers would certainly be selling larger SSDs since they know there is a market for them. For now, large storage devices are still going to rely on traditional hard drives unless you combine several SSDs together. Even with hard drives you need to be very careful not to purchase a drive using SMR technology.
Good luck.
Yes, it is disappointing that SSD capacities have been taken so long to increase in size. Five years ago, QLC NAND was suppose to help by offering larger SSDs and lower prices, but QLC NAND has not really taken off. It doesn't help that QLC NAND is much slower than even the already slow TLC NAND, but QLC NAND is much less resilient as well, just like TLC NAND is less resilient than the former MLC NAND.
Keep in mind those SSDs may not even be real SSDs. I have seen so many reports where many of the unknown SSDs flooding the market may be fakes. Sometimes they will take parts from other SSDs cobble them together. Other times they will take a real SSD and flash their firmware to make them appear to be larger SSDs, when in fact they are much smaller SSDs.
Here is one article on the cheap fake Chinese SSDs flooding the market and I have seen others as well:
I really like this post on a thread on Tom's Hardware where a person was asking about fixing the reporting of a fake drive size of a Chinese SSD as it sums things up very well:
FYI, you do need to be careful with how you utilize SSDs. SSDs cannot be used reliably for long term storage where the SSD is stored away on a shelf for archival purposes. An SSD requires having power applied to it once in a while to keep the NAND memory cells refreshed and the data intact. While an SSD manufacturer told me that it usually takes a couple years for the data to deteriorate, I have seen some reports this has occurred in as little as six months without power. Plus SSDs are much more susceptible to power fluctuations and issues as well. Most of the SSD failures I have personally seen with our organization's computers have not failed due to becoming warn out, but due to the SSD's controller failing so that the SSD no longer could communicate with the computer meaning the data could not be recovered (maybe an expensive data recovery service could recover data, but we never tried since it was never needed because we had backups).
I would definitely prefer having my backups on a standard hard drive since backups don't require a fast drive after the initial backup has been made. Of course restoring a backup from a hard drive will be slower. It is always a good idea to have multiple backups through different methods and media.
I personally would not touch those Chinese SSDs even if you paid me. If something seems to good to be true, then it usually is too good to be true. It is usually a scam. The main manufacturers would certainly be selling larger SSDs since they know there is a market for them. For now, large storage devices are still going to rely on traditional hard drives unless you combine several SSDs together. Even with hard drives you need to be very careful not to purchase a drive using SMR technology.
Good luck.
I would avoid any cheap China crap products in general as they usually don't work well at best and many times will even damage other products connected to them. As far as SSDs go, even the ones from the known name brands tend to have a lot of low end junk that should not be touched, so how does anyone expect cheap junk flooding the market will be any better? Yes, maybe there may be an exception, but do you really want to risk your data? Even low end models from name brands may perform just as poorly as a traditional hard drive.
You want to erase the whole physical drive as GUID partition and select the file system of your choice. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. The physical drive may either be the make & model of the drive or for external drives it may be the USB chipset used in the device.
Sometimes Macs just won't work with certain drives as macOS can be very particular about the drives and USB chipsets used by external devices. This has always been the case for years, but it is even worse these days when using an M1/M2 Mac with Apple Silicon plus even macOS Monterey seems to have a lot of compatibility issues with external devices.
People should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. SSDs can fail at any time without any warning signs, even brand new SSDs. Cheap low end SSDs are even much more likely to fail. Many times it is impossible to recover data from an SSD.
Thank you. However, HDD is inferior to SSD because of moving (spinning) parts and hence inherited short life (I have dozen failed external and internal HDs). This is why I want SSD for my backup and data storage solution. All brand names (WD, LaCie, SanDisk, Seagate) offer low-capacity SSDs (1-4 TB) and very expensive without higher quality. I am puzzled why these brand names lag behind Chinese-made high-capacity SSDs. It seems to me SSD is a better choice for storage than HDD if we can get it to work with Apple devices.
Can't really add anything to the very good, solid opinion and advice given by HWTech. I fully agree with him so don't waste your time as with everything the less you pay the less you get.
Reformatting SSD for MacOS devices
