I’ve been busy with the technical stuff lately; not only that I had to transcode the database of the forum, to be usable by the new software, and write/adapt parts of the software to fit the needs of the community using it, but I also had a disproportionate number of hardware failures this year. Most of them were bloated or weakened LiIon batteries on phones and laptops, but we also had two NVMe drive failures, including one in the recent days, which was hard to diagnose because I initially suspected some driver or faulty Windows update, but as evidence allowed me to narrow it down, I started to suspect the Samsung system drive, and my confidence in that assessment grew to the point where I preventatively replaced it without waiting it to fail completely and force me to rebuild the system from the ground up. And yes, since I cloned and replaced the drive I had no more system freezes. As in the case with the two failed drives before (Mihael’s Adata SATA drive, and Biljana’s Samsung PCI-E drive in the 13″ Macbook pro), it was controller failure, which produces symptoms so similar it made it possible for me to diagnose it prior to complete failure this time. All in all, I had an increased number of drive failures since we moved away from HDD to SSD technology, and literally none of them were due to NAND wear, which everybody feared initially; it’s always the controller that goes, and it’s the worst case scenario because if you don’t catch it in time, it’s complete and irrecoverable data loss. However, only Mihael’s drive went all the way, because we were late in reacting to it malfunctioning for days, and likely weeks. With Biljana’s laptop, I already had some experience with SSD controller failure so I replaced her drive preventatively and all the symptoms ceased, and I did the same with my own system drive on the main computer. Basically, the symptoms look very much as if the system bus is clogging up and the system events are not going through. When that takes place, I’m starting to suspect the system SSD controller failure. This, of course, puts Apple’s practice of soldering SSD components directly onto the motherboard, so that the SSD can’t be replaced, into perspective. That’s just asking for trouble, because it turns something that can be a simple and straightforward process of “back the old drive up, replace it with a new one, and restore from backup” into motherboard write-off and replacement, and those are expensive. Sure, it can be a welcome excuse for replacing your obsolete computer with a new, more modern one, but in 2 out of 3 cases of SSD failure that I had recently, only one computer was obsolete and ready to be replaced, and two were perfectly good machines that required only a system drive replacement. I am seriously not a fan of having SSD and RAM soldered onto motherboards, because those are the two main things that have to be either upgraded or replaced due to failure, and not allowing for that is just screaming “planned obsolesecence”. It’s like not allowing the GPU to be replaced in a gaming PC, knowing that it’s the first thing that will need to be upgraded in order to keep the machine functional. Sure, I have a habit of keeping the old hardware in use until it becomes completely useless, which means I could occasionally use some sort of a push to buy a new, more capable system, but on the other hand, if I see nothing wrong with the system I’m using, in the sense that it does everything instantly and is not causing me any troubles, why would I have to be forced by the manufacturer to throw it away just because some component went off prematurely? The system I’m using plays Witcher 3 on 4K at 60 FPS, on ultra. It’s not a slow and decrepit system by any stretch of the imagination. If I had to replace the whole computer just because the system drive failed, I would be really pissed, and that’s exactly what would have happened with Apple, if I used one of their fancy-looking machines with SSD soldered on. The only one of their current machines that’s actually designed properly is the new Mac Pro, but that one is so expensive it makes no sense to buy it, unless you hate your money and want to see it burn. Someone will say that you have to pay for quality, but that’s really bullshit since they use the same Samsung NVMe drives I buy off-the-shelf to build my own systems, and based on my experience the drives they use are exactly as likely to fail as any other Samsung drive. So, sure, you can solder it onto the motherboard, but then I want a 5 year warranty on the motherboard with instant replacement in case of component failure, no weaseling out.
It’s like they are clinging to times long gone when two years meant complete obsolesce of current hardware. For me, that was between 1998 up until time I bought i7-3770K (2012 or 2013 I think, not sure any more).
Same thing with mobile phones in about the same period (2000-2015) where each two years brought significant performance and new features and abilities.
But after 3770K and iPhone 6S … the only significant thing that happened was SSD and aggressive marketing that each new iPhone brought new life meaning 🙂
Only reason for new hardware after 3770K was pure convenience (MacBook Pro, iPad) and not performance upgrade and there is only so much convenience you can get.
However, since manufacturers live in universe where they need to increase revenue each year forever they did not like the fact that people stopped upgrading hardware every two years, so they had to make sure that we do.
The fact that you have so many SSD fails in short period of time is quite scary especially because I bought new Mac Mini which has soldered 128Gb SSD (which is downright criminal as they can not argue thinness or some bullshit) – but I did not care because I do not need storage on that machine and I really did not take into account SSD can simply die off much sooner (long before wear issues).
If that happens, Mac Mini becomes very expensive piece of junk because changing entire board with (soldered) CPU to increase storage means I am better off buying new computer (and not Mac Mini for sure – even though I equally dislike both Windows 10 and Linux distributions).
On the other hand mid-2014 MacBook Pro has replaceable SSD and RAM and I just might keep that one as long as it ticks (battery was not that hard nor expensive to replace).
After 6 years of using it as main computer, it is still fast enough for everything I do (sure I could use a little boost in Lightroom, but I do not use it nearly enough to care) and only thing I did was replace battery and change CPU thermal compound.
I am also more and more inclined to fix stuff as long as I can instead of buying new super-soldered machines.
The problem with mac mini is that, if one could disable the soldered-on nvme when it malfunctions, the device could still be booted via USB or thunderbolt, but since you can’t remove it, it will most likely lock the computer into some freeze-loop, blocking the pci-e bus. I guess if someone had the schematics of the motherboard, he could cut the power to the onboard nvme controller which would prevent it from registering and doing damage, and then you could install the OS on an external drive and boot from that.
I think T2 chip is there to prevent you do just that and changing entire main board is the only way to fix malfunctioning ssd.
I think if you boot into external SSD and wipe the internal one, that would still work, and disabling the internal one electrically I would say 90% would work. The T2 chip would prevent you from changing the onboard SSD or tamper with encryption and security. The advantage of thunderbolt 3 is that something like this would work as fast as the internal drive: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/portable/x5/
I found a solution to that problem:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/15/how-to-make-new-t2-secured-macs-boot-from-external-drives
You need to boot into recovery mode (command-R), open startup security utility, turn off OS signature checking and turn on booting from external drive. Then it behaves like a normal pre-T2 mac.