Monterey and External SSD Drives

[Bob White]

Just a heads up for you to check before updating to Monterey.

Apparently, Monterey only recognizes APFS formatted external SSDs. In updating both my MacBook Air and my iMac, the only problem I have encountered to date is that the external SSD that I do Time Machine on wouldn't mount. It was still formatted MacOS Journaled. Stuck it in my daughter's MacBook Pro, still on Big Sur, and it mounted normally. If you are in Catalina or Big Sur, the solution is to open Disk Utility and in its Edit menu there is a choice available named "Convert to APFS...." But read on first.....

Research on the Internet left me with the impression that the results are not usually what is desired or just doesn't work. I ended up copying my backup to a second available disk, using the daughters MacBook Pro, then reformatting my external SSD to APFS then copying the backup file on to that. (Don't forget to make a copy of the backup file before you do anything.)

[alan]

Hi Bob,

I have updated to Monterey and haven't found any problems (apart from one small menu-bar app that needs updating).

I have 3 SSDs (1 x 1TB & 1 x 2TB) I use for doing T/Machine backups and whilst I have not had to re-format any of them, I noticed in Disk Utility that each one is now recorded as APFS Container(s).




So I presume that the OS has done this automatically during the upgrading installation.

[SGilbert]

Hi Bob,

I have updated to Monterey and haven't found any problems (apart from one small menu-bar app that needs updating).

I have 3 SSDs (1 x 1TB & 1 x 2TB) I use for doing T/Machine backups and whilst I have not had to re-format any of them, I noticed in Disk Utility that each one is now recorded as APFS Container(s).

So I presume that the OS has done this automatically during the upgrading installation.

If you had them connected while upgrading, that might have happened.

Thanks for the heads up, Bob, as I will likely be ordering a new 16" MBP to replace my '15 15"MBP soon. My backup 2 TB Time machine, however is a spinning HD. Problems with it too??

[Bob White]

Yes, an undocumented nice little gem. As part of my research, I connected a brand new SSD, opened the Time Machine app and immediately got the dialog requesting which device to use. This brand new SSD, as many new hard disks and SSDs, was formatted FAT. Chose the new SSD and after a delay of maybe 30 seconds, the "first backup" started. After that was completed, I checked the SSD and found it had been automatically reformatted to APFS. Nice! (Note: This was an experiment using a small 250 MB SSD. My usual Time Machine backup is on a 2 TB SSD.)

I failed on my homework and that is why I encountered this situation. APFS came to us with Mavericks. After hitting this bump in the road, I went back and looked at several articles circa the intro of Mavericks. All of the articles alluded that at some future date APFS will be the format -- the only format! Oh, well. Live and learn.

[Bob White]

.....My backup 2 TB Time machine, however is a spinning HD. Problems with it too??

Don't know and can't experiment as I no longer have any spinners. I would guess it to be the same way. This doesn't seem to be bothering USB jump drives. I did read this morning that some brands of powered USB hubs quit working. Here is an article on that... https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/29...sues-reported/.

[Herb]

Please disregard

[M Ali]

I am using 2 external SSDs (Samsung 500GB T5) connected via USB 3.1 (Gen 2) to a Mac mini (2018). All the volumes are APFS. While I haven't experienced your exact issue, I did notice that it is taking much (longer compared to Big Sur) to mount the APFS volumes from external drives. I haven't measured the time, but I would estimate that all the volumes -- including encrypted Time Machine volumes -- mount within a few minutes.