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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

#321

Post by GhettoComputers »

dsana wrote: post #319
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.?

You're misunderstanding. It's not about the wear. It's about failure of the SSD. Any failure. I've had a SSD fail and it was covered under warranty. Wasn't wear related and it was barely used. A month or so old. So yeah, SSD failure is realistic for me as an issue. YMMV

I don't disagree with backing up, but you don't think that will repeat again do you? What brand was it? It sounds like one of those cheap $19-$25 128GB ones with no cache and made with the worst quality, was it one of those? Cheap SSDs are notoriously low quality and unreliable.

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

#322

Post by smoldesu »

notriddle wrote: post #301
CelestialTeapot wrote: post #200

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. 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…

> 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 understanding. Apple, Google, Facebook and the other top dogs all help create the illusion of choice in exchange for keeping the SEC off their backs.

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

#323

Post by krrrh »

kennywinker wrote: post #307
krrrh wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

The question is what percentage of the material that enters their recycling program actually cycles back into new things, and how much carbon is burnt doing that. I'm glad apple is exerting engineering resources to make their products recyclable and out of recycled materials - but I also can't ignore that linking the lifespan of the entire computer to the lifespan of the SSD is going to result in many unnecessarily d…

The SSD being the thing that takes down a computer seems like a theoretical concern (for most users). They certainly typically have longer lifespans than spinning drives. I wouldn’t be too surprised if my parents’ hermetically sealed fanless MacBook Air is still sipping power a decade from now.

And that’s to say nothing of the extra materials that would be required to house a socket for a separate SSD board which 90% of users would never avail themselves of.

They have for sure increased the recycling rate massively since 2010. Lisa Jackson went from head of the EPA to Apple in 2013, and that’s also when they started to really focus on device longevity, and fostering the pass your old phone down to your kids or up to your parents plus trade-in and refurbish models.

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

#324

Post by mig39 »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #311
dsana wrote: post #308

Good to know that when I get a Mac I should remember to never store user data on it as primary. Must have active sync as primary. The local storage should really be seen as only a cache. This article caused a bit more research summarised as: When that SSD dies the system is dead along with its contents. No particular recovery feasibly possible. So, yeah, that SSD is a cache of the user data for editing local and a di…

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.

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

#325

Post by formerly_proven »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #317
formerly_proven wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#326

Post by kube-system »

int_19h wrote: post #310
kube-system wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disaster recovery is not a backup, nor should it supersede physical security in importance. Time Machine solves all of these problems.

For the vast majority of home users, disaster recovery does supersede physical security in importance.

It might, when it's too late. But it still shouldn't, because better options exist that prevent a disaster in the first place.

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

#327

Post by dsana »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #321
dsana wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding. It's not about the wear. It's about failure of the SSD. Any failure. I've had a SSD fail and it was covered under warranty. Wasn't wear related and it was barely used. A month or so old. So yeah, SSD failure is realistic for me as an issue. YMMV

I don't disagree with backing up, but you don't think that will repeat again do you? What brand was it? It sounds like one of those cheap $19-$25 128GB ones with no cache and made with the worst quality, was it one of those? Cheap SSDs are notoriously low quality and unreliable.

Samsung 256gb. It failed.

I'm not sure what else to say. I know that SSD fail from direct experience. This doesn't mesh with you. I get it.

So yeah a Mac or other device with a soldered SSD is less trustworthy.

I'm not even talking backup as best practice or some good idea. I'm actually saying that due to this pattern of unreplaceable SSDs, the cloud copy IS the primary copy. The local copy on SSD is now just a cached file. That is a very big difference.

This isn't even an Apple thing. But they are one of the first.

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

#328

Post by kennywinker »

krrrh wrote: post #323
kennywinker wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what percentage of the material that enters their recycling program actually cycles back into new things, and how much carbon is burnt doing that. I'm glad apple is exerting engineering resources to make their products recyclable and out of recycled materials - but I also can't ignore that linking the lifespan of the entire computer to the lifespan of the SSD is going to result in many unnecessarily d…

The SSD being the thing that takes down a computer seems like a theoretical concern (for most users). They certainly typically have longer lifespans than spinning drives. I wouldn’t be too surprised if my parents’ hermetically sealed fanless MacBook Air is still sipping power a decade from now. And that’s to say nothing of the extra materials that would be required to house a socket for a separate SSD board which 90%…

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-...

> After taking into account drive age and equalizing it between SSDs and HDDs, we can see that the results have changed significantly. SSDs aren't that far behind hard drives in failure rate, with a 1.05% annualized failure rate compared to 1.38%.

But it hardly matters. If the failure rate is 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 - either way there are a staggering amount of M1 macs that will be trashed every year because of failed SSDs.

You are right, the standard on-board connectors are extra material. It'd be a fun engineering challenge to reduce the non-recyclable material cost of standard connectors.

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

#329

Post by GhettoComputers »

dsana wrote: post #327
GhettoComputers wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with backing up, but you don't think that will repeat again do you? What brand was it? It sounds like one of those cheap $19-$25 128GB ones with no cache and made with the worst quality, was it one of those? Cheap SSDs are notoriously low quality and unreliable.

Samsung 256gb. It failed. I'm not sure what else to say. I know that SSD fail from direct experience. This doesn't mesh with you. I get it. So yeah a Mac or other device with a soldered SSD is less trustworthy. I'm not even talking backup as best practice or some good idea. I'm actually saying that due to this pattern of unreplaceable SSDs, the cloud copy IS the primary copy. The local copy on SSD is now just a cache…

I'm very suprised, I believe you, but I never had such an occurance happen ever to me, and I never worried once about it. Not even my cheap free android phone NAND failed in such a way, and I was given a microSD that had write disabled but had all the data left to read off it (not my data didn't care about it), but I never had any bad experinces with flash memory in my life.

Don't forget external drives for data!

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

#330

Post by nomel »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #220
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 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 services, it's the good old method of having some form of archival media to keep it on, which was the whole draw of the cloud services, when they first came out.

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