fluffy rambles: Warning about macOS 12.0 Monterey

Warning about macOS 12.0 Monterey

October 25, 2021 11:42 PM (2 years ago)

I’m running into a pretty severe problem with my external USB 3.1-connected NVMe drive on macOS 12.0 on my M1 mac; something in the system is causing the drive to get extremely hot (to the point of disconnecting within a few minutes) when there’s no recorded activity going to it, and also while it is connected, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test reports that it’s only capable of around 150MB/sec, which is significantly less than what it usually gets. Which tells me that something in the OS is causing the drive to go under significant load.

I tried disabling Spotlight, both from the GUI and using sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/storage, which made no difference.

For now I’ve put the drive into the second slot of the dual-NVMe Thunderbolt enclosure on my studio computer and am using that to transfer the files over to my SATA SSD (over the network); the Thunderbolt enclosure doesn’t seem to be having the heat issues, at least (or maybe it’s just better enough at dissipating heat). Unfortunately the USB enclosure was having the same heat problem on the studio computer (which is an Intel MacBook Pro, also upgraded to Monterey, because I am a damn fool) so the problem doesn’t seem to be M1-specific, and instead seems to be something to do with the enclosure itself.

Hopefully this gets fixed soon.

I really should have listened to common sense and not upgraded my machines until 12.1 came out. What was I thinking? At the very least I should have held off on the studio machine, what with Novembeat starting in a week and music hardware and software being notoriously bad about continuing to work between OS releases. But, you know me and my impulsiveness. (Or rather, I really can’t stand having a notification hanging around and macOS really loves notifying you of an update being available.)

Update: Also having the problem on the Thunderbolt dock in my studio computer, it just takes longer to manifest because the Thunderbolt dock has better heat dissipation. Damnit.