Slow boot time after update to Mojave - External SSD

I use external Thunderbolt SSD (which boots < 1 sec. to the Apple logo), but my VM volume was not mounted as well ("diskutil apfs list"). This seems to be another bug that Apple have to fix. I mounted VM volume manually and tested with "memory_pressure -l critical". The swap is working properly, now. Thanks for letting us know.

I dont boot from my external. Boot is internal, external is just user data.

But yeah erase as apfs on the external ssd ‘appears’ to have fixed it. But i have only booted once and the drive was empty, not 80% full like normal. Copying data back now to test some more

A fellow can have an External SSD and Mojave and Slow Boot times (i.e., pretty much the exact topic of this thread, almost word-for-word) but still not please the volunteer Off-Topic Police because one dares to mention -- gasp -- "Little Snitch."

Happy to be informed that it also happens in High Sierra, although I've not seen that myself. The first time I saw it was when I cloned my High Sierra 1TB internal SSD to a 2TB external SSD and then updated the clone to Mojave and tried to boot to it. Indeed, had I not experienced the problem, I never would have Googled up this thread nor commented within it.

I await a MacOS update (and -- hold on to your hats OT Police -- an update to "Little Snitch") to see how those updates address the problem.

Thats strange. Mine takes about 5 seconds max before the Apple Logo comes up. I have 3 External USB 3 HD, 1 BR/DVD Burner/Reader, Scanner attached to my iMac. They power up first and spin up then the iMac Apple logo comes up less that 5 seconds. Then the boot up process is super fast as before with the External SSD. Perhaps a combo update is what you need or make sure you select the SSD as the Startup Disk again?

Instead of doing the Mac OS Update Only from the control panel, which only applies added updates, Apple has the combination update which combines all. In some cases for some users (including me) this has helped resolved strange behavior after a standard update. If my Mac is acting weird after the standard update, I use the combo to stabilize it. Lately the normal updates has been good, except for this boot delay, that I haven't had the need to do a combo in awhile. Some people like to do combo updates only. https://support.apple.com/downloads

Definitely an improvement on my 2015 iMac with USB 3.0 Samsung EVO 860, however there's still about 14 seconds between the chime and the Apple logo, so still not perfect. Still, at least it's usable again now.

We... Installed the Combo update version. Same thing as the regular 10.14.3 update.

Takes about 25~27 seconds to show the apple logo. And more 35 seconds to get fully started and ready to use.

Come on... It is a 2017 27"!

Should be better this boot.

I'm using my Samsung T5 1TB connected to the USB-C port.

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable-solid-state-drives/portable-ssd-t5-1tb-mu-pa1t0b-am/

With my internal FusionDrive the apple logo appears in about 5~6 seconds and more 25~30 seconds to get fully started and ready to use.

Now it's much better than those 3min to start, but still not solved my problem yet.

You can enable trim support for external SSD with thunderbolt-enclosures.

Terminal: sudo trimforce enable

Anyway, I hope they bring out a fix for this annoying issue.

Same here. Using a SAMSUNG Portable SSD T5 connected over Thunderbolt USB-C to USB-C. Time until loadscreen shows 2-5 minutes.

Hi,

Turned it off and then disconnected.

Thanks for your reply. Thats exactly what I experienced.

I bought an Samsung X5 today, that’s an external thunderbolt 3 NVME SSD.

No delay-problems at boot anymore.

The Sleep crahses are most likley related to a bridge os (T2 chip) crsah that happens on many recent macbooks and imac pro etc. macs with T2 chips. A whole other problem.

Does anyone know if this is still working with beta 4 of 10.14.3?

Thanks for sharing that with us. Hope they release the final version soon!