I have owned a Mac of some form for about 10 years now and recently upgraded from an intel iMac 5K to the mini M2 Pro.
I am pretty pleased with the performance of the mac when it is working correctly, but I wonder if there are still bugs left in the design for the outlayers who push what is capable with this computer. Some might be me trying to work around the heafty Apple Tax and price premium that Canadian owners have to pay. Drive capacity should be cheep and NVME doesn't cost anywhere as near as what Apple is charging for storage. Sure the direct connected media is much faster potentially than external, but as I grew up in the birth of personal computers where my old Apple ][ had a cassette deck, and it was a speed marvel when we moved to a 5 1/4" floppy disk, everything is relative. On my older iMac the built in SSD was really fast, but the Thunderbolt 2 SSD drives were still really responsive for data and most work that I needed to get done so my 3-4TB of external drives were required to move with me.
I don't know if I'd say that Apple lied to me when they told me that I could connect my TB2 drives to the new Mac Mini with an Apple adapter, or if it was just a stretching of the truth as to what was and wasn't bug free inside the OS or hardware capabilities. But to say the end is it just doesn't work.
For whatever reason, the M series chips doesn't work with anything SATA it seems. So an older 4TB lacie TB2 hard disk that I have been using for drive image backup using Carbon Copy fails 2-3 times a day. Effectively its whenever the mac goes to sleep, it cannot wake from sleep and understand how to properly reconnect with the SATA hard drive connected to the TB4 port with an adapter. This drive works flawlessly with my old iMac still, and with an intel mini 2016 model. So I will say it isn't the drive itself that is at fault. I have read that the Mac Pro units also cannot handle SATA drives even with a dedicated SATA port built inside. So I would think that this is an actual hardware/software problem with the new M series chip, that Apple just hasn't bothered to fix as of yet. But the issue also extends to the SSD drives that I have inside my OWC thunderbot bay also periodically will sometimes get booted out and told that they didn't disconnect correctly, so I think there is more than just a spinning hard disk issue at hand.
So then you get to other external connected devices. I bought a USB-C 3.2 external NVME case. Again just like the SATA via thunderbolt, the usb3.2 external nvme drives have disconnect issues too. this is a fundamental usb function. it is not like there is loads of specifications on how to correctly connect. As Apple had built the usb into the M2 chip, it falls on Apple to correctly implement the functions. this they have not done. Again, it will just decide to boot your drive off for no apparent reason. Phoning apple support, they say that as it's a third party device that Apple offers no support. But it isn't the device that is causing the problem, it's apple USB that is at fault. If you hook the device up to an older intel based mac then it will work flawlessly.
I had it that with the drive hooked up and I was writing to it that the drive corrupted itself as it booted the drive out at the most inoppertune time that messed the whole drive up. But that in turn caused the mini itself to have a kernal panic causing itself to reboot. But as the attached USB drive was still attached when the mini rebooted it got itself into a perpetual loop. I figured out I needed to remove the usb drive after it rebooted 3 times, but by that time it had messed up the intenal drive that it too needed to get rebuilt.
This bring to the next design flaw. The M series macs don't use the same keyboard boot shortcuts anymore. So if you hold down the Option key on startup it does nothing. No boot menu option. Hold down the option R and you don't get recovery. hold down shift and you don't get safe mode. OK. so how do you do anyting to recover?
On a laptop it shows you a menu that tells you what to do, but as the mini doens't have a built in screen, they removed this and just expect you'd know that you're supposed to hold the power button down until the menu comes up. This brings up the single internal boot drive and options. ??? still no recovery. So you need to select options that will give you access to recovery. (why then don't you just call it recovery as its the only option). Well, sort of not as it is inside this menu that if you did you can redefine the boot drive. So what was a simple single keyboard option on the intel mac, it is now a 3 minute multi key press to boot from an external drive. but what they have removed is access to drive functions. So you cannot do fix partition first aid on any drive now as this option is totally removed. I was told by apple that you need to go into safe mode on a boot partition to get that. But as the internal drive was what was corrupted, the only option is to wipe and restart. But to pour salt onto wounds, The frist part of the problem comes up as apple doesn't work with external attached devides so my Carbon Copy image drive was what got corrupted while attached to the M2 mini. So I would have lost everything.
I spent the hour for it to wipe, reformat, reload a clean OS back onto the mini. But I couldn't attach the carbon copy external drive as it's APFS partition was funky causing the kernal panic and reboot on the M2 mini. Luckily for me I still have an old intel mac mini that I can attach the external drive to. it does allow you to boot into actual recovery mode and has the drive functions to do a repair to the APFS partition so that I didn't loose all my backups.
So my take to this is that the only Apple approved backup solution is icloud that apple charges you mega dollars if you were trying to backup your whole mac to it.
I am pretty pleased with the performance of the mac when it is working correctly, but I wonder if there are still bugs left in the design for the outlayers who push what is capable with this computer. Some might be me trying to work around the heafty Apple Tax and price premium that Canadian owners have to pay. Drive capacity should be cheep and NVME doesn't cost anywhere as near as what Apple is charging for storage. Sure the direct connected media is much faster potentially than external, but as I grew up in the birth of personal computers where my old Apple ][ had a cassette deck, and it was a speed marvel when we moved to a 5 1/4" floppy disk, everything is relative. On my older iMac the built in SSD was really fast, but the Thunderbolt 2 SSD drives were still really responsive for data and most work that I needed to get done so my 3-4TB of external drives were required to move with me.
I don't know if I'd say that Apple lied to me when they told me that I could connect my TB2 drives to the new Mac Mini with an Apple adapter, or if it was just a stretching of the truth as to what was and wasn't bug free inside the OS or hardware capabilities. But to say the end is it just doesn't work.
For whatever reason, the M series chips doesn't work with anything SATA it seems. So an older 4TB lacie TB2 hard disk that I have been using for drive image backup using Carbon Copy fails 2-3 times a day. Effectively its whenever the mac goes to sleep, it cannot wake from sleep and understand how to properly reconnect with the SATA hard drive connected to the TB4 port with an adapter. This drive works flawlessly with my old iMac still, and with an intel mini 2016 model. So I will say it isn't the drive itself that is at fault. I have read that the Mac Pro units also cannot handle SATA drives even with a dedicated SATA port built inside. So I would think that this is an actual hardware/software problem with the new M series chip, that Apple just hasn't bothered to fix as of yet. But the issue also extends to the SSD drives that I have inside my OWC thunderbot bay also periodically will sometimes get booted out and told that they didn't disconnect correctly, so I think there is more than just a spinning hard disk issue at hand.
So then you get to other external connected devices. I bought a USB-C 3.2 external NVME case. Again just like the SATA via thunderbolt, the usb3.2 external nvme drives have disconnect issues too. this is a fundamental usb function. it is not like there is loads of specifications on how to correctly connect. As Apple had built the usb into the M2 chip, it falls on Apple to correctly implement the functions. this they have not done. Again, it will just decide to boot your drive off for no apparent reason. Phoning apple support, they say that as it's a third party device that Apple offers no support. But it isn't the device that is causing the problem, it's apple USB that is at fault. If you hook the device up to an older intel based mac then it will work flawlessly.
I had it that with the drive hooked up and I was writing to it that the drive corrupted itself as it booted the drive out at the most inoppertune time that messed the whole drive up. But that in turn caused the mini itself to have a kernal panic causing itself to reboot. But as the attached USB drive was still attached when the mini rebooted it got itself into a perpetual loop. I figured out I needed to remove the usb drive after it rebooted 3 times, but by that time it had messed up the intenal drive that it too needed to get rebuilt.
This bring to the next design flaw. The M series macs don't use the same keyboard boot shortcuts anymore. So if you hold down the Option key on startup it does nothing. No boot menu option. Hold down the option R and you don't get recovery. hold down shift and you don't get safe mode. OK. so how do you do anyting to recover?
On a laptop it shows you a menu that tells you what to do, but as the mini doens't have a built in screen, they removed this and just expect you'd know that you're supposed to hold the power button down until the menu comes up. This brings up the single internal boot drive and options. ??? still no recovery. So you need to select options that will give you access to recovery. (why then don't you just call it recovery as its the only option). Well, sort of not as it is inside this menu that if you did you can redefine the boot drive. So what was a simple single keyboard option on the intel mac, it is now a 3 minute multi key press to boot from an external drive. but what they have removed is access to drive functions. So you cannot do fix partition first aid on any drive now as this option is totally removed. I was told by apple that you need to go into safe mode on a boot partition to get that. But as the internal drive was what was corrupted, the only option is to wipe and restart. But to pour salt onto wounds, The frist part of the problem comes up as apple doesn't work with external attached devides so my Carbon Copy image drive was what got corrupted while attached to the M2 mini. So I would have lost everything.
I spent the hour for it to wipe, reformat, reload a clean OS back onto the mini. But I couldn't attach the carbon copy external drive as it's APFS partition was funky causing the kernal panic and reboot on the M2 mini. Luckily for me I still have an old intel mac mini that I can attach the external drive to. it does allow you to boot into actual recovery mode and has the drive functions to do a repair to the APFS partition so that I didn't loose all my backups.
So my take to this is that the only Apple approved backup solution is icloud that apple charges you mega dollars if you were trying to backup your whole mac to it.
