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

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

#331

Post by notriddle »

smoldesu wrote: post #322
notriddle wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them No man is an island. If my mom is insecure, then all the messages I sent her are leaked, too, no matter how secure I try to be. If my boss is insecure, then I'm even worse off than that. Also, if high-security stuff is normalized, then you don't wind up stuck in a place where you have to choose…

>E2E encrypting the whole world is also the best defense against the government passing laws that make E2E encryption illegal. The government doesn't need to pass laws to ban encryption (at least in America) since they design the encryption standards themselves. It's basically common knowledge at this point that everything NIST cranks out is vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis beyond the domain of public underst…

>It's basically common knowledge at this point

What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

And what's really annoying is that you are doing a bad job of arguing for a position that I actually kinda agree with. NIST has published a backdoored elliptic curve-based RNG[1]; don't trust them. Encryption algorithms need some sort of verifiable provenance for where those numbers came from.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

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

#332

Post by GhettoComputers »

mig39 wrote: post #324
GhettoComputers wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never had any SSD fail in my life ever. This is a worry for some, but its not a realistic fear. You can write TB daily to most SSDs and it'll still not wear out. What's your current SSD's usage written in S.M.A.R.T.?

The plural of anecdotes is not data, but in my relatively small experience, I've had two SSDs die. And when they die, there's usually no warning. One was a windows box with a generic Kingston 480GB. The other was in a 2014 MacBook Air. In both cases, both completely dead with no data recovery possible.

I never liked those kingstons, thats too bad about the MacBook Air. What did you end up doing with it?

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

#333

Post by GhettoComputers »

formerly_proven wrote: post #325
GhettoComputers wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine came with a 500GB SSD, the older one I had I swapped it since it came with an HDD. I never had computer ram ever fail me, ever in my lifetime, have you? Unless you bought it with low specs, it isn't useful is it? I'd add ram to low spec computers, but my current one came with one slot and 8GB, no change to it for me.

> I never had computer ram ever fail me, ever in my lifetime, have you? Yes.

That sucks, I never once replaced failing ram, just low ram.

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

#334

Post by whywhywhywhy »

nomel wrote: post #330
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems absurd to me, yeah ok the SSD failing could be indicative of a bigger issue. But also now if any single component required to boot the machine fails then I also lose my data. We've turned several potential failure points resulting in data loss into almost every component on the board failing resulting in data loss. We all know how much they charge for a full board replacement though and why this change wil…

I think that getting people to understand that regular backup are necessary when physical things, that exist around water, other humans, and electricity, are involved, is an impossible task that usually ends in tears. If you don't back up your data outside of a single entity, you will lose that data eventually. iCloud is the obvious choice for critical data, within the Apple ecosystem. Outside of one of the cloud ser…

As experienced technical people we know that users will never grasp that no matter how many times we tell them, we’ll still be getting handed laptops that can’t boot and the “my only copy of my photos are on there, can you get them off?”

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

#335

Post by dirkg »

donkeyd wrote: post #193
azalemeth wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is especially unlikely to be the underlying cause of unexpected and seemingly premature catastrophic SSD failure. One of my graduate students experienced this, the hard way: writing up his thesis, his mum plugged in "the wrong USB C" charger. I don't know exactly what happened, but the board was utterly fried. The problem with the soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's al…

> 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.

the motivation for soldered everything is profit margins and the ripoff prices for upgrades.

Not security. There is no additional security here

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

#336

Post by stefan_ »

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…

I don't understand. The majority of shitty ARM chips in the world come with immutable mask ROM that allows the system to bootload from something like USB. There is nothing you can write here that would make the current situation on Apple Silicon Macs not be an absolute embarrassment and design flaw.

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

#337

Post by nieve »

lamontcg wrote: post #139
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…

> The SSD is reasonably considered to last the "lifetime" of the product Except for simply running of out drive space. So if you want to buy something and have it last 5+ years you need to spec it out from the start to have way more drive space than you think you'll ever use. Or else when it runs out and you really need that extra space you're forced to upgrade everything in order to get the extra space since you mad…

Unless for some reason your vendor (Lenovo) has decided to stick a second M.2 slot in your laptop model and you can just buy an expansion drive in a couple of years when they're cheaper without having to swap out your old one. That was one of the nicer surprises about the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2. I'm guessing you can get a configuration that uses both slots from the start, but I didn't see it when I bought mine.

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

#338

Post by dirkg »

nomel wrote: post #330
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems absurd to me, yeah ok the SSD failing could be indicative of a bigger issue. But also now if any single component required to boot the machine fails then I also lose my data. We've turned several potential failure points resulting in data loss into almost every component on the board failing resulting in data loss. We all know how much they charge for a full board replacement though and why this change wil…

I think that getting people to understand that regular backup are necessary when physical things, that exist around water, other humans, and electricity, are involved, is an impossible task that usually ends in tears. If you don't back up your data outside of a single entity, you will lose that data eventually. iCloud is the obvious choice for critical data, within the Apple ecosystem. Outside of one of the cloud ser…

this is like telling someone that if they lose their keys, or if a light bulb inside their house goes bad, they will lose their house and all their possessions, and then say 'you should insure everything you own'.

Its a ridiculous decision by Apple made purely for profit

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

#339

Post by stefan_ »

bogantech wrote: post #164
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…

> 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 use a hardware SPI flasher to recover. T2 could have been designed to store / recover the rom in an SPI flash too. It's just cheaper to store it on the SSD

Or, in case of failure, just enable loading the fricking EFI bios from an alternative source. It's amazing the kind of nonsense people write because it's an Apple thing - machines have been able to boot diskless for very obvious reasons and requirements ever since the 8 MiB memory chip, but in 2021 we should go without that?

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

#340

Post by umvi »

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

I don't believe it. I've had several SSDs fail, and the rest of the system was fine in every case. SSDs can fail for lots of reasons. My wife's laptop had an SSD fail (Hynix). Unclear why it failed but the laptop was less than 2 years old. SSDs have super complicated firmware on them and can get in a permanently bricked state after sudden loss of power (for example). I swapped her SSD out with a WD one and it's been good now for 5+ years.

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