2021 m1 mbp booting os monterey from a external nvme drive. performance issues.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

it is a little strange, and can't be un-done quickly, but you can throw the Internal drive into the Trash and its statuys will change to Un-Mounted/Ejected.

Another option is to use Disk Utility to "Unmount" the volume. This way, the volume can be remounted if needed without rebooting. I'm not sure if the volume will automatically mount after waking from sleep.

(You can also re-mount it with Disk Utility.)

AFAIK, once ejected, the drive will remain inaccessible until a reboot (or possibly when the computer wakes from sleep).

There is a way to create an "fstab" entry to exclude the volume from automatically mounting. A respected forum contributor has created the following article with the instructions (still allows you to manually mount the volume if needed using Disk Utility):

Prevent a volume from mounting at startup - Apple Community

Note: On Step#9, when it says "type escape to return to the command mode", you just need to press the "ESC" key on the upper left of the keyboard (or leftmost item on the Touchbar).

I would recommend going with Plugable, StarTech, or OWC for enclosures. I prefer Plugable these days, but the don't have a lot of selection, StarTech is my next choice. OWC makes good quality enclosures, but they are down on my list since many OWC devices do not allow access to the drive's SMART health information, nor do they support the UASP protocol (some vendors like Plugable list it as "UAS") for USB3.

You usually get what you pay for when it comes to electronics. Just because a vendor uses a known quality chipset, it does not mean the supporting electronics are sufficient for reliability & stability.

I've never use Orico, and never investigated them since I've always had great experiences from StarTech & OWC....I've only recently in the last ten years came across Plugable which I really like since they post a lot of low level technical details with their products. There may be a few other brands which may be of the same caliber, but I cannot think of them at the moment, nor I have I used any others.

I do know that Macs can be picky about the drives they use, especially for booting.

Did you enable TRIM? I'm not sure if macOS will allow TRIM to be enabled on an external boot drive...another recent post confirmed that macOS does not enable TRIM on an external data drive. I don't know if booting from that drive would make any difference. I think the computer hardware determines if TRIM can be processed through the USB/Thunderbolt ports.

Also, check to see if that Samsung drive is one of those affected by a known issue. I recall reading a month or two ago about some major issue with the more recent Samsung SSDs, but don't recall exactly which models were affected. Check to see if there is a firmware update for that SSD available from Samsung.

Seems like the issue is with the 990 Pro and started with the 980 Pro:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/pc-maker-pulls-samsung-pro-ssds-after-users-report-abnormal-health-drops/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/samsung-releases-firmware-fix-for-rapid-failure-issue-in-new-990-pro-ssds/

Samsung SSD Firmware Downloads

https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/

it is a little strange, and can't be un-done quickly, but you can throw the Internal drive into the Trash and its statuys will change to Un-Mounted/Ejected.

It will stay Ejected until you restart, so I hope you did not really need it for anything. (You can also re-mount it with Disk Utility.)

<< AFAIK, once ejected, the drive will remain inaccessible until a reboot (or possibly when the computer wakes from sleep). >>

I defer to your knowledge of the subject. I stand corrected.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

<< AFAIK, once ejected, the drive will remain inaccessible until a reboot (or possibly when the computer wakes from sleep). >>

I defer to your knowledge of the subject. I stand corrected.

Unmounting leaves the physical drive "connected" where it can be remounted.

Ejecting seems to unmount the drive and powers it down, at least for external drives (or at least it seems to put an external drive into a different state where it is no longer able to communicate with the Mac). I've only ever been able to access an "ejected" drive by physically disconnecting the USB cable for the drive & reconnecting it. I've never really tried ejecting an internal drive, but would assume it would behave the same way.

Unfortunately Apple kind of equates "ejecting" with "unmounting" when the two terms are different. For a regular user, using Disk Utility to "Unmount" a volume is the only way to keep the volume available (the command line is another to separate the two) since the Finder only provides the "eject" option AFAIK.

I'm probably one of the few where this distinction is important since most people are just disconnecting external drives to be removed whereas I have needed to keep drives available for later use without physically disconnecting them.

Hi,

As far as I know, Apple Silicon Macs can't start up macOS from external drive which might be trouble key point.

Now that you have been using the drive a while, does it test at essentially the same speed as before, or has it slowed down?