Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#281

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #76

liminalsunset wrote: post #26

General grumpiness about this particular design decision aside, it appears that since the T2 Macs, the main SSD was being used to store core system firmware. On T2 I think it's BridgeOS that sends the EFI image to the Intel side to boot it, and it does the firmware verification and loading. This setup has a benefit; namely, it is now impossible to brick the system with a bad BIOS/EFI flash, and you'll never need to u…

>whatever failure damaged the SSD is statistically likely to compromise the reliability of the rest of the board Sorry, but how? That's just reads like BS. SSDs have limited lifespans due to the limited write cycles of the NAND chips. So no, what damages NAND does not damage the rest of the board. The more you write and swap to flash, the faster it wears out, taking your Macbook down with it when it dies. Granted, I…

Heh, I wrote pretty much exactly the same thing, should have read all the comments first.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#282

Post by formerly_proven » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #277

formerly_proven wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to replace memory and storage is very critical for anything that will see a lot of use. Both of these are certainly not "lifetime" items.

I never had to replace either, although I don't want them non replacable. External/cloud storage can take care of space, and memory corruption is a fear, but nothing I worry about, batteries are worst than both combined.

I don't think I ever had a single machine where I stayed with the storage it came with.

As for memory, DRAM doesn't really have a particularly long lifetime (iirc design life is something like 75k hours), and that certainly shows in servers - memory modules start to fail a lot after the four year mark. And here I don't think I ever had a machine where I didn't upgrade memory at least once.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#283

Post by Robotbeat » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #146

Robotbeat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, the CPU is almost irrelevant. A huge issue is software locked to a certain motherboard. And the fact that your Raspberry Pi isn’t going to be running x86 software flawlessly and doesn’t come with nearly the same peripherals as a typical laptop (without a lot more cost… but even then, a 1:1 replacement isn’t possible). The assumption that tech gets exponentially cheaper over time, ie Moore’s Law, only a…

Even if it’s not cheaper, the devices aren’t really desirable. Most people don’t want a desktop, they want mobile devices. Lots of people still use old computers and significant upgrades don’t happen in the same generation which is the issue with upgrading Intel CPUs. x86 isn’t what it was, MS made Windows 11 be able to run android apps, consumers don’t care about x86 software anymore. That’s been true since ChromeOS…

It’s funny. I literally just had a long conversation with a fellow researcher still running a laptop from the late 00s, dual booting windows (XP!) and Linux. He is super happy with how reliable and effective it is, plenty of ports without a lot of software cruft. He does a lot of hardware instrumentation interfacing with it.

Do developers typically use ChromeOS to do development? I don’t think it can run, say, LabView or Matlab (the latter it MIGHT be able to, with some extra work, but not natively). It’s all a pretty big headache to use a device for serious work that is optimized for passive consumption and web browsing and social media. Everything you want to do that isn’t in a web browser is a pain.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#284

Post by StillBored » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #258

StillBored wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back it up to some cloud vendor that also holds the encryption keys... Brilliant bit of security there... /s

If you don’t want that, back it up to a cloud service that doesn’t hold the encryption keys. Eg, use tarsnap. It’s your computer and your data.

Thanks, I don't remember trying tarsnap. I use $OTHERBIGVENDOR and its been sticky, because I have ~60T of large files (miniDV .mpg captures/4k video/etc) mixed with an insane number of .5k files from git repos/etc.

That combination has broken just about every modern cloud backup application I've tried to use over the ~10 years that meets a short list of minimal features I require (locally stored encryption keys for one). It actually breaks $OTHERBIGVENDOR in its default configuration as well, but I've collected a pile of tweaks/etc that keep it functional although I've managed at one point to cause my account to go into a reindexing mode on the servers that didn't complete for months too.

So, maybe at some point. I've got some experience in the space :) and I've considered writing my own when I eventually give up on $OTHERBIGVENDOR. So many of them are written in "modern" languages and the clients are outrageously slow, or get exponentially slower as the data set grows.

I've looked at tarsnap in passing in the past, but haven't gotten around to trying it because from their description of what appears to be a traditional referenced counted global dedupe. I suspected it of having problems when the hash map need to track 50T+ unique hashes from all those video files across backups.

PS: That doesn't mean there aren't good tools, my local backups are via rsnapshot to an offline USB+RAID I plug in once in a while.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#285

Post by ooboe » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #110

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>whatever failure damaged the SSD is statistically likely to compromise the reliability of the rest of the board Sorry, but how? That's just reads like BS. SSDs have limited lifespans due to the limited write cycles of the NAND chips. So no, what damages NAND does not damage the rest of the board. The more you write and swap to flash, the faster it wears out, taking your Macbook down with it when it dies. Granted, I…

In practice, exhausting NAND write endurance is usually not what causes SSDs to fail in the field. It is especially unlikely to be the underlying cause of unexpected and seemingly premature catastrophic SSD failure. Also, it is not possible for an SSD to decrease your usable storage space over time. That would break any partition table format or filesystem that expects an ordinary block device. It also wouldn't win y…

https://tesla-info.com/blog/tesla-mcu1-emmc-failure.php

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#286

Post by katbyte » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

CelestialTeapot wrote: post #200

donkeyd wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery Well, that's kind of the point. > You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly. Exactly. And that's as easy as plugging in an external hard drive occasionally, or storing critical files in the cloud.

>> soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery >Well, that's kind of the point. Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them, and do nothing but cause heartache when the internal SSD fails. And fail they do. it's rare, but I've had several SSDs (Toshiba and Crucial, if…

> 99% of the people

I think you underestimate this number. Most businesses are going to want security/encryption over ability to recover data to prevent leaking secrets in the case of a lost/stolen laptop.

as for everyone else, backups really need to become the norm for everyone because as you say any HDD/SSD can fail for any reason anytime beyond any possible recovery apple laptop or not.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#287

Post by dev_tty01 » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #268

lostgame wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> and should it fail, I don't consider the inability to externally boot to be a huge problem …the flying fuck?! I stopped reading here. I was all for your comment until I heard this nonsense. …in what world is this acceptable? What computer have you personally purchased between 1980-2010 that could not have had this core essential part simply replaced if it did not function correctly? I’m not sorry for complaining;…

I don't see why maintaining past expectations is such an important design consideration as you're making it out to be. Expectations change as needs change. Do you still expect to be able to replace your BIOS flash chip, or the controller on your HDD? Furthermore, do you really believe it's a realistic scenario that a customer would be buying a top-of-the-line flagship device for which portability is a main selling fe…

I want to get my job done! When I have had a drive fail in the past, I boot off my periodic clone drive and keep going. With the no external boot scenario, I have to keep a backup computer rather than a backup drive.

I don't travel constantly, just occasionally. I am typically close to my external clone. If I was going to be on extended travel, yes, I would bring the external clone SSD with me.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#288

Post by krrrh » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #280

quitit wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landfill and the environment are legitimate concerns.. i’m just gonna quote the website > The new MacBook Pro has been carefully designed with the environment in mind. The enclosure is now made with 100% recycled aluminum. And we use recycled rare earth elements in all the magnets in the product. MacBook Pro is free of numerous harmful substances and all the virgin wood fiber in our packaging comes from responsibly-m…

I'm going to call very large amounts of BS on #2 -- Apple devices are infamous in electronics refurbishing circles. Thousands of very functional devices are being scrapped instead of being reused because they are soft-bricked due to never being deregistered from iCloud accounts, for various legitimate reasons that have been discussed ad nauseam (and shouldn't be the responsibility of the end user in any case). Many s…

If I take a box of old apple devices and accessories to the Apple Store from any point in the history of the company, they will put them through their own recycling program. A box of old PCs will go to my municipal e-waste program and end up in an incinerator (which is the best case scenario, but we know what happens to e-waste in a lot of jurisdictions).

That iPhone torturing robot [0] that they demoed a few years back may have seemed a bit silly, but I don't think any other electronics manufacturer is concerned about finding a const-effective way of separating the screws from other metals before recycling everything.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bu-gl7v-P8

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#289

Post by wtallis » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

ooboe wrote: post #285

wtallis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, exhausting NAND write endurance is usually not what causes SSDs to fail in the field. It is especially unlikely to be the underlying cause of unexpected and seemingly premature catastrophic SSD failure. Also, it is not possible for an SSD to decrease your usable storage space over time. That would break any partition table format or filesystem that expects an ordinary block device. It also wouldn't win y…

https://tesla-info.com/blog/tesla-mcu1-emmc-failure.php

Do you have a point? Linking to a story about an embedded system that experiences flash wearout is not really relevant here. You're trying to make a comparison against a far smaller and lower-quality storage module than typical consumer SSDs, subjected to a vastly different workload. There are no useful conclusions to draw about consumer PCs from that case.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#290

Post by inb4_cancelled » Tue, Nov 02, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #262

bitwize wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except soldering everything on can give you HUGE performance boosts. Like, laptops come with soldered-on RAM that you can't get in a DIMM configuration because the soldered on stuff is so fast it needs a fast path to the CPU, which DIMM slots can't provide. And now with Apple building all system RAM directly into the chip die, it's just a whole new ballgame. So you can either go modular and have a slow PC, or you can…

This argument doesn't work with Apple. They built laptops that could literally just use 50% of their CPU because of insufficient cooling. Not too long ago they released a Macbook with a CPU cooler that doesn't even have direct contact with the CPU. And when LTT modded the cooler to fix it they realised the performance was still not better because the power delivery is insufficient as well. Also our PCs are not slow,…

Maybe that CPU cooler wasn't really a CPU cooler after all, if it didn't have direct contact with the CPU.

Maybe the fan was more of a case fan and it simply ran air through the whole machine INCLUDING the CPU heatsink, which is AFAIK exactly how it worked.