macOS 12 SSD issue update

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Going through a few rounds of troubleshooting with folks on the macOS community forum as well as Apple tech support regarding the SSD overheat issue has helped me determine the following things:

  • Whatever this problem is, it’s uncommon; nobody else seems to have experienced it
  • The enclosure itself isn’t to blame; it happens on both my Plugable USB 3.1gen2 and on my Sabrent dual-slot Thunderbolt enclosure
  • The overheating is only happening on the Crucial 2TB NVMe stick (that normally lives in the USB enclosure); having just the PNY stick (which lives in the Thunderbolt enclosure) doesn’t overheat, moving the PNY stick to the USB enclosure doesn’t overheat, and the Thunderbolt enclosure only overheats if I have both the PNY and the Crucial stick in it
  • The overheating stops if I unmount the drive but leave it electrically-connected
  • Mounting the drive even under macOS Recovery causes the overheat to occur just as quickly

For now I’ve moved my most critical files from the Crucial stick to my older SATA drive (which isn’t having trouble) so I can continue to work on the things that I normally do on my desktop, and my studio laptop seems to be okay with the PNY+Thunderbolt combination so I don’t think Novembeat is at risk because of that, at least.

This does mean I won’t be able to work on music from my desktop computer in the meantime, and video editing will have to be direct to NAS, which is doable, just not ideal.

Hopefully this all gets sorted out in a macOS update.

Mac mini updates

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First off, I am a dummy and completely failed to notice that there are in fact two USB-A ports on the Mini itself. The dock was completely unncessary for my initial setup. Oops!

Also, I just played some test content in HDR and holy heck it looks pretty amazing. Conveniently enough, Safari supports HDR in YouTube while Firefox doesn’t, so I was able to play some videos side-by-side to see the difference, and it was pretty immense, especially in the extremes. Which is, of course, the whole point to HDR.

I’ll probably keep using Firefox for usual video stuff, though, because I’m not a fan of not having a decent ad blocker. Hopefully Firefox adds HDR support soon!

EDIT: Oh yeah, I ended up force-quitting the NI installer so that I could finish installing some system updates and the Wacom driver and so on. What’s really cool is that even though the Wacom driver is still x86, Rosetta still emulates it. Holy cow. Also the Silicon Macs use a new driver signing thing that’s a little onerous but also exposes a nicer way of going into the startup disk selector (now you just hold down the power button while booting, no need to remember an awkward keyboard combination that doesn’t always map right to whatever weird keyboard you’re using at the time).

Also, I had meant to do some disk speed tests as well. See below!

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