High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

As most of us know High Sierra automatically converts the system drive to APFS as part of the installation process. The process does not move your file data. It does copy and reformat file system metadata, but does not erase the old metadata until the rewritten metadata has checked out. The metadata provides information about other data and I believe this is where the problem is.

The communication between the computer CPU and the SSD flash drive is corrupt. Unless the firmware in the flash drive is compatible with the APFS file system you will have all the above problems..

I ended my testing and twiddling with High Sierra 10.13.2 about a week ago. Why? For the time being I've had no more problems and it's running like it's supposed to on my Mac Pro 5,1. Not to say I've found the complete cure but just some observations from my end..

High Sierra is the FASTEST system on a Mac I've ever had after running it between two brand new Crucial SSD drives for a week. I'm sure there are other SSD drives that play well with High Sierra including Apples new OEM drives.

The Mac Pro is a good drive test platform inasmuch with four drive bays you can hot swap drives to your liking and it's enlightening when you’ve had problems with High Sierra as most of us have. I believe IMO that certain SSD brand drive configurations, firmware, internal or external are creating the majority of the High Sierra problems.

More by accident, not by design in my case I've found that any SSD drive that is polled by the system or all non compatible SSD drives active in the computer, boot drive or not will slow down High Sierra to a crawl or lock it up completely. The one early HFS drive in my system is still bootable and loaded as a backup in my system has given me no problems at all. I'm sure if I booted to this drive I'd probably run out of coffee before it loaded tho...

At any rate I believe it's come down to SSD drive choices, firmware in the drives, etc due to the APFS file system. And it doesn’t matter if a drive is the active boot drive or not, just ANY SSD flash drive being polled in the system will mess up High Sierra as I've found with one OWC SSD drive that High Sierra actually unmounted in the background as it was causing problems. After the idle SSD drive unmounted (on it's own) only a complete restart would bring HS back to normal.

I'm going to stick with Sierra on our 2015 Mac Book Pro for now as we have no way to save it's data and swap to another compatible SSD drive at the moment.. It seems Apple has put a "no comment no information" regarding High Sierra for the time being.. IMO, when Apple finally comments APFS flash drive compatibility will be the main subject..

Well, it's been about a week since i updated to 10.13.3 - so far so good- no freezes. One thing that has persisted is the occasional inability of Safari to close when shutting down- requiring a forced shut down thru the power button- the menu item of forced close won't work.

G

I have a 2013 Mac Pro and I just tried 10.13.3 and so far so good. The last three times I tried High Sierra I would have a hard freeze usually within a couple of hours. It doesn't say they addressed the issue in this release but something must've been done because it is different for me. Let's see if I can go a week like this or if I spoke too soon...

Mac Pro 2013 (Trashcan) user here. I also have this problem and it is very frustrating.

At first, I thought it was related to Spotlight. Disabling Spotlight on some directories where I do a lot of S/W development has helped for a while, but it has been acting up lately. It froze on me another 3 times today 😠.

Symptoms are: mouse pointer becomes beachball of death. Can move the mouse, audio works, but can't click on anything at all. Keyboard commands don't work. Only solution is to power off.

This is on 10.13.3. I really hope that you are correct about 10.13.4 fixing this issue. This only happens on my Mac Pro -- my 2016 MacBook Pro (15) doesn't have these issues.

I was reading in another thread that some guy had the dock on the left and solved the problem by moving his dock at the bottom.

the computer that had the same problem here had the dock on the left as well. I just moved it to the bottom and see if it solves the problem.

Ill keep monitoring as well.

Just a little thing here. I have about 25 computers running high sierra but none of them have that issue. Seems like all of you having this issue have a SSD.

Could it be faulty SSD?

Anyway can boot up on an external HDD and see if the problem is still there?

Hello, i have Macbook pro 2016 and detected closing the lid about 2 minutes or poweringoff the wlan accespoint that the device is connected to give the ability to just resume from the moment of freezing.

Kind Regards

Mohamad

I eventually got so fed up that I rolled back to Sierra and now everything works fine. Fortunately I had a clone on an external drive.

For me after 10.13.1 it's much better. I haven't reconnected external display or tablet but I have not had any freezes for 3 consecutive days.

Hey I installed the fix too and I didn't get the error. Maybe you have some other version of the NVidia driver?

I use web driver 378.10.10.10.20.107

Hope it helps

Hey, me again...

In this thread System freezes since High Sierra some guys are saying 10.13.2 Beta 2 fixed the issue for them.

Maybe this could help those that don't have an Nvidia card.

Try running the command "sudo purge" from the Terminal.

I'd consider upgrading to 13.2

it takes awhile, but after finished - besides a few settings on my machine changed - it's running smoother.

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1944?locale=en_US

Some peoples fix is to run time machine until finished and have nothing pending there and it fixes their issues.