Mojave to Monterey: external SSD drive performance plummeted/unuseable

[godzfire]

Mac Mini 2018. I've been on Mojave and not wanting to update and lose my 32 bit apps, but finally pulled the trigger and did an inplace update to Monterey 12.3.1 last night.

At first, everything seemed like it was okay, besides all the changes between versions. However, since working on the computer today, I've had horrible slowness/performance with the external TB3 enclosure with Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVME drive I use as my location where my Chrome and Chrome Canary profiles live (to offload drive wear due to heavy streaming and data transfer since my Mini SSD is small and socketed).

I originally thought I was having network issues as my Canary profile wouldn't even load pages like there was no network connection, but if I ran a Chrome profile directly from the Mini, everything was just fine. I never had any issues before on Mojave with this drive and setup but today I've had YouTube videos buffering and websites becoming unresponsive/slow because the transfer rate to my enclosure seems to have just sucked because of Monterey.

I really don't want to do this, but I think I have to do a restore back down to Mojave, unless anyone has any ideas. Doing some Google searching I'm seeing a lot of similar issues being reported on the Apple forums, here, etc. Does Big Sur have these problems?

SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus SSD 1TB, M.2 NVMe [bought Nov 2020, firmware possibly not up to date, but can't seem to update either]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MFZY2F2/)

Plugable USB C to M.2 NVMe USB C and Thunderbolt 3 Compatible TB3/USB enclosure [firmware up to date]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N48N5GR/).

 

[kemo]

Having similar issues with external drives (SSDs), which work fine on Big Sur and lower. Wish I could downgrade but since I am on the latest MBP 16" I have to patiently wait and hope for the fix from the Apple.

 

[godzfire]

Are other people experiencing this issue? I upgraded from a USB 3.1 Gen 2 case to a OWC Envoy Express TB3 enclosure and it increased by write/read speed by about 300 MB/s to 1150w and 1540r. However, even with that I am still getting some page loading or page elements loading lag with Chrome.

Again, when I was on Mojave for years I was going off the same old setup with the older/slower case, and never once had an issue with this.

I don't want to go back down to Mojave again, but it would be really frustrating to have to try doing ANOTHER fresh install, this time down one OS to Big Sur.

 

[Biggus_Baratheon]

Same problem here, except my OS is on the external drive. WD blue with Sabrent enclosure. Worked fine until the Monterey update...

 

[godzfire]

Same problem here, except my OS is on the external drive. WD blue with Sabrent enclosure. Worked fine until the Monterey update...

Were you using Big Sur prior by chance? Trying to find out if that OS is 'safe'.

 

[Biggus_Baratheon]

Were you using Big Sur prior by chance? Trying to find out if that OS is 'safe'.

Yup it was fine on Big Sur, I got max drive speeds from the enclosure.

 

[godzfire]

Yup it was fine on Big Sur, I got max drive speeds from the enclosure.

Great, now I have to decide whether to go back an OS version and do another install.

What did you do?

 

[harriska2]

I have a 2018 mini that was on Mojave. I put all my data on a really slow 10TB HDD. It was getting really slow after 3 years. I then upgraded to Monterey and replaced the 10TB HDD with a 4TB 870 EVO SSD in a OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini USB-C 10Gb/s Portable Storage Solution simple external case. It seems to work well. When waking up the computer and accessing the drive, I do get spinning but that is only maybe once a day. Otherwise it has been running well since December.

 

[Fowl]

Have you tried disabling Spotlight on the external drive? Might it be reindexing and thus slowing down?
Is the external volume APFS formatted, or still HFS+?

 

[Biggus_Baratheon]

Great, now I have to decide whether to go back an OS version and do another install.

What did you do?

Ive just been hoping Apple fixes it! Reinstalling the previous is a bit of a hassle.

 

[godzfire]

DELETE

 

[godzfire]

I have a 2018 mini that was on Mojave. I put all my data on a really slow 10TB HDD. It was getting really slow after 3 years. I then upgraded to Monterey and replaced the 10TB HDD with a 4TB 870 EVO SSD in a OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini USB-C 10Gb/s Portable Storage Solution simple external case. It seems to work well. When waking up the computer and accessing the drive, I do get spinning but that is only maybe once a day. Otherwise it has been running well since December.

Unfortunately that isn't a good test comparison, because going from a spin HDD to a modern SSD with a USBC connection is an insane upgrade where everything would feel incredibly faster.

Have you tried disabling Spotlight on the external drive? Might it be reindexing and thus slowing down?
Is the external volume APFS formatted, or still HFS+?

It's APFS, all my drives are. Spotlight is exactly the same as it was when the OS was Mojave. That was the only thing that changed and when the problem started.

Ive just been hoping Apple fixes it! Reinstalling the previous is a bit of a hassle.

That's what I was afraid to hear.

 

[Biggus_Baratheon]

I had a massive problem this weekend where the external ssd would no longer boot. Moving back to the internal HDD for now and ill retry the external ssd whenever Apple fixes the external speed problem 😞

 

[Fowl]

I had a massive problem this weekend where the external ssd would no longer boot. Moving back to the internal HDD for now and ill retry the external ssd whenever Apple fixes the external speed problem 😞

From the folks who make Carbon Copy Cloner (courtesy of macintouch.com):

In the past, a "bootable backup" was an indispensable troubleshooting device that even novice users could rely upon in case their production startup disk failed. The reliability of Apple's External Boot solution has waned in the past several years, however, and the situation has grown starkly worse on the new Apple Silicon platform. Apple Silicon Macs will not start up (at all) if the internal storage is damaged or otherwise incapacitated, so there is very little value, if any, to maintaining a bootable rescue device for those Macs.

Read the whole article.