MacMini 2018. 2 Acacias 405 NVMe SSD Enclosures with 2TB Lexar NVME strips APFS formatted, Sonoma installed, connected to USB4/Thunderbolt ports.
Expected behavior: during startup with option key pressed, choice between internal HD or either external NVMe SSD Enclosures.
What happens: no startup choice, automatic startup of last time chosen HD.
Second NVMe SSD Enclosure invisible.
Mac mini, macOS 14.3
How did you get Sonoma installed on the external drive? Using this Mac or another one?
No matter what you should see the Option Boot screen with the Apple boot picker menu. Make sure to hold the Option key immediately after hearing the startup chime. Holding it too soon can sometimes prevent the system from recognizing it....same with pressing it too late....you really only have less than a second to press it after the startup chime.
Disconnect all external devices from the laptop to make sure you can get to the Option Boot screen. Then connect the external Sonoma boot drive to see if it appears as a boot option.
Does the external drive appear as a boot option if you go into the Startup Disk System Settings? Can you even see & navigate the external Sonoma SSD?
Just to confirm you have the plain TBU405 enclosure and not the TBU405Air version since the "Air" version only works with Thunderbolt 3/4 & USB 4....the "Air" version is not backwards compatible with USB3.x.
How did you get Sonoma installed on the external drive? Using this Mac or another one?
No matter what you should see the Option Boot screen with the Apple boot picker menu. Make sure to hold the Option key immediately after hearing the startup chime. Holding it too soon can sometimes prevent the system from recognizing it....same with pressing it too late....you really only have less than a second to press it after the startup chime.
Disconnect all external devices from the laptop to make sure you can get to the Option Boot screen. Then connect the external Sonoma boot drive to see if it appears as a boot option.
Does the external drive appear as a boot option if you go into the Startup Disk System Settings? Can you even see & navigate the external Sonoma SSD?
Just to confirm you have the plain TBU405 enclosure and not the TBU405Air version since the "Air" version only works with Thunderbolt 3/4 & USB 4....the "Air" version is not backwards compatible with USB3.x.
What happens if you daisy-chain the enclosures from a single port?
To confirm, you never get to the Startup Manager with both drives connected?
If you only have one connected and Startup Manager appears, plug in the second drive and see if it appears.
With any sort of port weirdness, I would try an SMC reset. Reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support
According to the product page, the 405/405Pro supports Thunderbolt 3/4, as well as USB4/3.x/2.x. When using a Thunderbolt rated cable (one with the lightning bolt icon) I would assume it will utilize Thunderbolt protocol when connected to a USB-C Mac. The product documentation shows a Thunderbolt 4 cable (lightning bolt icon with the number "4").
However, I would assume the Thunderbolt 4 cable would also support the USB protocol as well. Only way to confirm the protocol being utilized by the enclosure is to check the Apple System Profiler in the USB & Thunderbolt sections to see which one the enclosure is associated. I would always be concerned about cases where there may be some issue and it may not handle or recognize Thunderbolt & instead attempts to connect with the USB protocol.
Check the Apple System Profiler to see what protocol these drives are utilizing when connected to your Mac. Can you see both SSDs when booted into macOS? If not, do you at least see both Acacias enclosures even if the SSD is not seen.
Sounds like a compatibility issue with the Acacias drives, the SSD, and/or the Mac. Perhaps the issue is with the Lexar SSD you are using. You may want to try checking the health of those SSDs by using DriveDx (free trial period) and posting the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar so we can examine the health of both SSDs.
Probably will need to contact Acacias technical support for assistance.
Interesting that both of those Thunderbolt3 enclosures are showing up under one Thunderbolt port. I would expect one to show up on each port. When Option Booting, the EFI firmware may not be able to recognize the 2nd drive if they are both "appearing" on a single port. The macOS system firmware is extremely basic so it is possible it can get "confused".
Since you have an Intel Mac, you may want to look into the rEFInd graphical boot manager to see if that may help. I don't know whether it would have the same problem or not. If you configure rEFInd to know about the external boot drive, then it may be able to still boot to it even if the EFI firmware is unable to immediately recognize the bootable external drive.
I doubt either Acasis or Apple will care about this particular problem, but feel free to contact them for support. You can provide Apple with product feedback here:
jantu wrote:
The box says : TBU405ProM1. With 1 405 connected : no problem. In Startup Disk System Settings both internal SSD and external TBU405ProM1 visible and either one can be chosen as startup disk.
With 2 TBU405ProM1 connected after reboot : (option key pressed at the right moment) no choice of startup disk on offer. MacMini starts up from last chosen boot disk.
Yes, I got all of that the first time you posted it.
What happens if you plug in the second drive after the Startup Manager shows the first drive and the internal?
Did you try SMC reset?
you can not daisy-chain. Acacias 405 has only 1 port.
Do you use a different Thunderbolt bus for each drive?
Acacias 405 delivers 2300/2500 MB/s reliably, but MacMini only boots 1 at the time, 2nd one connected remains invisible.
jantu wrote:
you can not daisy-chain. Acacias 405 has only 1 port.
So,they are not Thunderbolt enclosures, just USB?
Option-booting Mac mini 2018 from OWC Dual Drive Dock USB-C as well as many other USB enclosures with SATA drives works for me OK with about 530 MB/s.
I have considered moving to faster NVMe M.2 (or U.2) disks but I have postponed that because I have heard that many NVMe drives might yet not work as reliably the old SATA drives do.
So the NVMe SSD has two Sonoma installs but only the other is shown in Option-boot dialog, right? Are they in the same APFS container (not that it should matter. AFAIK it matters only in that a volume can not "bless" a volume in the same container as bootable).
I have numerous bootable volumes with different macOS versions in the same APFS container and they all are shown in Option-boot dialog.
Both 2TB Acacias 405 ProM1 were Sonoma 14.3.1 installed from same MacMini 2018.
With 1 Acasis connected to a thunderbolt port I can get to the Option Boot screen and choose
built-in SSD or Acacias 405.
When both Acacias 405 ProM1 drives are connected, when I hold the Option key immediately after hearing the startup chime, no option boot screen. Instead the MacMini reboots from the disk chosen last time.
In the good old days of Apple the rule was : if the plug fits it works. I was maybe a bit naive in thinking :
MacMini , 4 ports Thunderbolt4, so I can connect 2 Thunderbolt external drives with Intel approved cables.
No I can not. Why?
Even in the specs of the MacMini there is no clear cut mention of how many ports can be used for
Thunderbolt4 drives. Only the specs for displays are clear.
Could Apple be just as clear about external Thunderbolt4 drives please?
The box says : TBU405ProM1. With 1 405 connected : no problem. In Startup Disk System Settings both internal SSD and external TBU405ProM1 visible and either one can be chosen as startup disk.
With 2 TBU405ProM1 connected after reboot : (option key pressed at the right moment) no choice of startup disk on offer. MacMini starts up from last chosen boot disk.
These units are connected by Thunderbolt 4 cable. In order to be a Thunderbolt enclosure it has got to have 2 Thunderbolt connectors?
Maybe they are USB enclosures. Question remains why does MacMini 2018 not allow 2
MacMini 2018 (4 port USB/Thunderbolt) does not function correctly with 2 NVMe SSD Enclosures
