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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

#341

Post by dirkg »

jdminhbg wrote: post #253
throw3849 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

》The primary argument against soldering the SSD, or really any other part, down like this tends to be that "Oh, now you can't just save money by upgrading it yourself|replacing it when it breaks Are you trolling? The primary argument is data recovery. Anything on laptop can die: charging port, motherboard... With soldered ssd your data are gone! You need to resolder SSD into exact same machine type, it may take 5 wee…

I don't see how data recovery is an issue. You should be backing up off-site and locally anyway. Why would you optimize for the specific case of most of the laptop dying but not the SSD? It's more likely your laptop will get stolen or lost or dunked in water or burned in a fire. The soldering will make no difference in that case. Use backups.

there is ZERO benefit to users of soldering an SSD or any other part. Its done purely for profit.

Stop conflating the issue with backups, the 2 have nothing to do with each other. Even if you take regular backups you can and will lose critical data when any $5 part on your $3-4k machine goes bad.

Amazing how far people will go to defend Apple.

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

#342

Post by floatboth »

brokenmachine wrote: post #300
CelestialTeapot wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what? Citation please. The speed lost moving a DIMM from a 3cm path-to-CPU to a removable DIMM slot 6cm away is infinitesimal. You would not notice it.

I've read that nowadays because they effectively have 8-channel or 16-channel RAM, there would just be too many connections to make them removable. Imagine 8 DIMMs next to each other, and then fitting that into a laptop form factor.

Channel != DIMM. Many small channels is just how LPDDR works, as opposed to DDR which has one big chungus channel. Well DDR5 has now split it in two. The total number of traces is the same.

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

#343

Post by omegalulw »

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…

> In practice, exhausting NAND write endurance is usually not what causes SSDs to fail in the field.

+1. The part that fails on consumer SSDs is typically the controller.

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

#344

Post by floatboth »

wtallis wrote: post #241
CelestialTeapot wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what? Citation please. The speed lost moving a DIMM from a 3cm path-to-CPU to a removable DIMM slot 6cm away is infinitesimal. You would not notice it.

For laptops, soldered vs socketed DRAM is mostly about power, not performance. But it is true that soldering DRAM makes it possible to reach higher bus speeds than are practical to achieve through a DIMM slot; this is why GPUs don't have upgradable RAM.

Laptops that have soldered RAM (including Apple) do not come with overclocked RAM though. I don't even know of any system with soldered RAM that would let you try pushing the speeds in practice, so this advantage is never leveraged.

But we do know how far DIMMs can go. Mainboard memory trace layouts have gotten ridiculously optimized. DDR4-5200 is a totally "normal" XMP spec now, there are even 5400 kits out there I think.

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

#345

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #316
zshift wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only issues I’ve run into with older laptops are limited wifi speed/range, the inability to decode HD video streams efficiently, and battery life, which is mostly solved by a new battery, though efficiency isn’t always great with older devices.

The heat is terrible too. You had no heat issues? All the laptops I had will cook you alive if you tried using them on your lap.

That is because laptop is a misnomer. While technically possible, most of them have some sort of vents for either air intake or outlet there. Which is then blocked. And makes it cook. Even if they vent backwards/sideways only, they still cook because the little free space between bottom and table(or whatever surface) is still blocked.

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

#346

Post by threeseed »

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…

> it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them

There are many places in the world where information on your laptop even criticising the government can end up in you going missing e.g. China, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar etc.

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

#347

Post by toast0 »

StillBored wrote: post #216
toast0 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had hundreds of enterprise SSDs fail on my servers, but only a couple had any pre-failure indicators in SMART, including write volume which was pretty low. The post-failure indicator was almost consistently no longer visible through the disk controller. Failure rate was much less than enterprise spinning disks, but at least with the spinners failed, you could still see them and get most of the data off, if you n…

If your running that big of a shop, I would call your channel partner/support group and bitch until they figure out whats failing. The usual expected failure modes for SSD's should be that they go into read only mode. If that isn't happening its either a firmware bug (probably) or a controller/vr failure which could be a process/heat/etc type of failure. Particularly for "enterprise" equipment the expectations isn't…

This was in managed hosting, we'd open a ticket and get teh SSDs replaced quickly, which was good enough for us. For the most part, the failure rate was about 10% of the rate of the hard drives, and concentrated in the systems with many disks, which were setup to handle disk failures, so it wasn't a big big deal.

Although we did get a couple of bad batches on our single disk systems, almost all of those failed within 2 weeks of install and we had the rest replaced.

I also suspect firmware bugs, but it wasn't convenient to upgrade them, so who knows. I did have to upgrade some of the same disks on single disk systems with low usage; the disks would sometimes timeout for no reason and confuse some of our OSes. The upgrade procedure was more or less PXE boot the manufacturer upgrade utility and hope it worked with whatever disk controller was there (eta: 5 minutes) or let the hoster firmware upgrade script run and hope it upgraded the ssd firmware and didn't mess anything else up (eta: 40 minutes per run, probably run it twice).

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

#348

Post by threeseed »

dirkg wrote: post #335
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.

the motivation for soldered everything is profit margins and the ripoff prices for upgrades. Not security. There is no additional security here

Of course there is additional security.

You can't just physically remove the SSD from the machine, place it in another and brute force the encryption.

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

#349

Post by mig39 »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #332
mig39 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just replaced the SSD with another one :-). My kid uses it now.

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

#350

Post by morpheuskafka »

azalemeth wrote: post #182
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…

> 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…

I work for my university's helpdesk and a lot of students learn this the hard way every day. We always require users to assume full risk of data loss whenever they check in for a repair. For most computers, if they aren't okay with that, we can just tell them to go to a third party shop and have the drive pulled out and imaged first. For recent Macs we basically just have to tell them it's gone for good if we can't get the machine booting without having to swap the system board.
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