Although not as “complicated” as your setup, I still have many things connected (8 external drives, monitor, Ethernet, audio out). Sometimes I need to use an old FireWire Edirol interface and need to disconnect some of my drives (physically, not just eject) and it’s my understanding it’s the amount of bandwidth per port on the M1s is less than the Intel models? Not as many lanes?
I’m using two powered hubs
Unfortunately you seem to have run into one of the more significant weaknesses of the M1, its USB & Thunderbolt connectivity. Strangely the TB performance of the M1 is even weaker in the iPad Pro.
Still random on my M1 Mac Mini 16 GB 2 TB model. While it's sitting idle (an hour or a few hours). The Corsair wired keyboard would become unknown to the iCUE application. iCUE controls the lighting and features on the Corsair keyboard. Still excepted as a keyboard by the Mac, just iCUE doesn't see it as a connected device. I must run Activity Monitor to force quit the iCUE application and try to launch it again, 50 - 50 success rate or reboot.
Do you have another device you can check it with? Or how about booting into the Recovery options to check in Disk Utility? Or better yet, make a bootable USB Installer and boot into that and then check that drive in Disk Utility?
I tried safe boot and recovery mode disk utility. The drive still locks up the Mac. I have a PC and I’ll check it. I’d guess the drive (or cable?) is bad, but I would not expect it to crash the OS. This isn’t 1998 USB.
Maybe not store your photos on "somebody else’s computer”, which is what the cloud is. You can buy a 3 TB usb drive that fits in your shirt pocket for less than $100 at Walmart.
It’s definitely the drive. I tried on pc and with different cable. What a bummer too.
I give Lightroom and Photoshop lessons on Mac mini’s 2018. I have quiet regular students with WD disks having mounting/read/write problems, so there seems to be indeed something between Apple and WD HDD drives …
Even on my M1 MBA, Finder hangs a lot of times when connecting a HDD. The whole experience going in and out of folders just feels janky.
Got my first Mac, a MacBook M1 Pro 32 GB 11 Nov. Editing video and hear about how fast Mac is, it was not. Great working with a Mac but not much action for the dollar. Running only Fcpx plus Rosetta for some Plug ins. The Mac freezes frequently when using Fcpx, QuickTime, Safari etc. Support guesses Motherboard, perhaps SSD, we will see. Currently its in Bring repaired.
