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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

#231

Post by novok »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #17
gameswithgo wrote: post #7

Consider options like Framework laptops that let you actually own your hardware, and repair it.

Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever. You can buy common business laptops such as thinkpad and swap the parts easily and cheaply. People aren’t swapping their 2011 i3 for a 2011 i7 if they care about performance; they’re getting an i5 from 2018. None of these swappable parts are unique aside from th…

TBH until very recently with the apple M1 archtecture CPU perf peaked about 7 years ago and laptops never really had a good GPU story. Improvements have been fairly incremental since then. Yes lower nm processes reduce energy usage, but we are even starting to approach a wall with that too now.

Personal laptops and desktops have become things you replace at car intervals now. And phones are starting to approach that too.

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

#232

Post by rsync »

1123581321 wrote: post #96
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…

I think you are using old information. Any modern SSD should be good for a few hundred to several hundred TB and may reach a PB. It would be very hard to use a personal computer that heavily. Most people would take 20 years or more.

"Any modern SSD should be good for a few hundred to several hundred TB and may reach a PB."

Actually, even more than that - here are some examples:[1]

Intel SSDSC2KB019TZ01 ("S4520") with 8.8 PB of lifetime writes

Intel SSDSC2KB019T801 ("S4510") with 7.1 PB of lifetime writes

Seagate ZA1920NM10001 ("Ironwolf[2] 110") with 3.5 PB of lifetime writes [2]

Samsung MZ-76P2T0BW ("860 PRO") with 2.4 PB of lifetime writes

[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notes/2021-q3-rsync.net_tech...

[2] https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1402397708329967618

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

#233

Post by kube-system »

fsflover wrote: post #169
lotsofpulp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is targeting the population that has no need for upgrades. Watching videos, browsing internet, sharing pictures and videos, video calling and basic spreadsheet/word processing needs no upgrades. I use a 2015 MacBook Air and I don’t need an upgrade, and I probably do more on my laptop than 80% of people.

> Apple is targeting the population that has no need for upgrades. And also those who very frequently do backups, because restoring the data from a failed SSD would be problematic.

Time Machine takes hourly backups. Setup consists of selecting a target and checking a box.

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

#235

Post by nottorp »

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.

> > 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.

Great; how do we opt out?

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

#236

Post by chaoskanzlerin »

thefz wrote: post #221
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.

> or storing critical files in the cloud. No. I refuse to let my vacation photos, hard drive images or hell, even my wallpaper collection to leave my house. No. I refuse. My data is my data.

Nothing stopping you from putting NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi

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

#237

Post by nottorp »

sofixa wrote: post #144
1123581321 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are using old information. Any modern SSD should be good for a few hundred to several hundred TB and may reach a PB. It would be very hard to use a personal computer that heavily. Most people would take 20 years or more.

You're forgetting swap. Not to mention professionals in domains like photography, design, video, etc. who might chew through big files frequently.

> You're forgetting swap.

8 Gb should be enough for everyone :)

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

#238

Post by Chocola »

kube-system wrote: post #214
Chocola wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because not everyone likes to share their most important files with a third party? Or because of providers scanning files or stuff like: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

If you seriously consider a state actor to be a threat, then you likely make many other compromises to your ability to conveniently perform disaster recovery. There is not much overlap between these use-cases: * I need an easy way to recover my family pictures because I didn't make backups and * I have state actors interested in my data If you really have state actor threats, you probably like that M1 Macs are very h…

If you are a state actor you probably love M1 Macs. You literally can't restore them without phoning home.

Everone should consider state actors as a threat because they are. They maybe are not specifically after you. But every now and then some big box gets popped leaking all kinds of personal information (including yours) and the actors are probably state sponsored. Also it is not state actors scanning your data, many cloud providers do so.

If you have a state actor as threat model you probably want to remove iCloud backups (see link):

"Apple’s iCloud, on the other hand, can be searched in secret. In the first half of last year, the period covered by Apple’s most recent semiannual transparency report on requests for data it receives from government agencies, U.S. authorities armed with regular court papers asked for and obtained full device backups or other iCloud content in 1,568 cases, covering about 6,000 accounts."

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

#239

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

mahesh_rm wrote: post #234

Not really knowledgeable of the specifics: Is it really currently unfeasible for a repair shop to figure out how to re-solder a new SSD, and "flash" the T2 chip?

Apple Silicon macs lack T2 chips, and you cannot "resolder the SSD" on modern Macs, really, you'd need to resolder 8-16 chips on the actual main board, make sure they are the right kind of chips (not something Apple will tell you), and then pray it works --- did it fail because there's a proprietary process of pairing SSD chips to the motherboard, or because one BGA ball on one of the chips didn't sit correctly? Or because it was the controller that died? It's a nightmare to test and pinpoint, you're better off replacing the thing.

There was a video of Louis Rossmann where he explained why he didn't want to do component level repairs on new macs if it was RAM or SSD. I trust his expertise on the matter.

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

#240

Post by GhettoComputers »

novok wrote: post #231
GhettoComputers wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever. You can buy common business laptops such as thinkpad and swap the parts easily and cheaply. People aren’t swapping their 2011 i3 for a 2011 i7 if they care about performance; they’re getting an i5 from 2018. None of these swappable parts are unique aside from th…

TBH until very recently with the apple M1 archtecture CPU perf peaked about 7 years ago and laptops never really had a good GPU story. Improvements have been fairly incremental since then. Yes lower nm processes reduce energy usage, but we are even starting to approach a wall with that too now. Personal laptops and desktops have become things you replace at car intervals now. And phones are starting to approach that…

M1 is just a continuation of the same, it’s just fanless, cooler, less energy usage and optimized for a few types of uses (very useful for web). CPUs really haven’t had a jump since sandy/ivy bridge, and GPUs got much better with the nvidia models in 2016, but it didn’t show up in the real world as much as it did in running machine learning algorithms. Gaming laptops existed with good if overly hot and expensive GPUs.
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