Intro: going SSD and enjoying the fast lane
Believe it or not, in late 2016 my 2009 MacBook Pro was still my primary machine. Evidently, my type of work doesn’t require cutting-edge performance; still, the Mac’s internal 5400rpm hard drive was by then more than 80% full, and every time I had to restart it was a pain, especially considering the amount of services and login elements that get activated at boot. From the initial Apple logo to a responsive Desktop, the MacBook Pro was taking more than 4 minutes to boot. It was time to get a solid state drive.
I had heard from other people who already upgraded their older Macs to SSD storage, and they were all astounded by the sheer increase in overall responsiveness. The consensus was that their Macs were getting a new lease of life, that the difference was so noticeable it was almost like having a new Mac.
Since the internal optical drive of the MacBook Pro had died a few years earlier, and the hard drive was still working well, the perfect upgrade solution was to purchase an OWC Data Doubler Kit so I could replace the dead optical drive with an SSD, while retaining the original hard drive. The new arrangement became a sort of poor man’s Fusion Drive: I would use the SSD for the system and applications, while leaving all space-consuming data (photos, videos, music, etc.) on the hard drive.
And what other people had said was true. After installing Mac OS X and rebooting the Mac, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The full boot process had gone from 4 minutes and 40 seconds down to about 35 seconds. Everything became incredibly responsive. Most applications opened instantly, and saving a few seconds for every little thing you do on your Mac while working means that ultimately you end up saving a considerable amount of time on the whole.
The SSD had also been a lifesaver for another reason. The time to upgrade my MacBook Pro was clearly drawing near anyway, but at this time Apple had released the new MacBooks with the dreaded butterfly keyboard design, and that, combined with the much increased prices, didn’t feel appealing at all. The SSD, with the performance increase it had provided, had also bought me time to decide how to proceed with an eventual upgrade.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I was able to delay an upgrade until mid-2018; I got a 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac instead of a laptop; and then in late 2018 I also purchased a used 2013 11-inch MacBook Air, thus splitting portability and sheer performance in two different setups.
Warning signs?
By the end of 2018 and in the early months of 2019, the old MacBook Pro had begun displaying several worrying issues that made me think it was on its last legs: random shutdowns, inability to access the discrete graphics card, temperature sensors acting up or not displaying information at all, and general unreliability.
A couple of times, after waking the MacBook Pro from sleep, everything was frozen and I had to force a reboot. Then, on another two occasions, the SSD was not detected at boot and the Mac started from the old recovery partition in the hard drive. In both cases, shutting down the Mac and leaving it alone for a while was enough to fix things, and at the next reboot the SSD was detected as usual. When it happened another time, it appeared that only a reset of the SMC would take care of the issue.
Warning signs? I’d tend to agree, except that the SSD kept working fine for many months afterwards, with no strange behaviours or reduced performance.
Just like that
Fast forward to March 2020, when I start noticing that the MacBook Pro’s trackpad isn’t clicking properly and it takes more effort to get a consistent click out of it. After close inspection, it was clear that the MacBook Pro’s battery, located underneath, had started to swell, pushing upwards against the trackpad.
Knowing the hazards of using an electronic device with a swollen Li-Ion battery, I decided to act promptly. I turned off the Mac, opened it, removed the battery very carefully, gave the fans and vents a quick clean, closed the Mac, and switched it back on. The SSD wasn’t being detected.
I did like the previous times. Turned off the Mac again and left it alone for a few hours. Nothing. Reset the SMC multiple times. Nothing. Swapped the SSD and hard drive (in case something was wrong with the SSD connector). Nothing: the hard drive was being detected as usual, but not the SSD. I removed the SSD and installed it in an external SATA enclosure with its own separate power supply. Nothing.
The SSD was gone. Just like that.
I didn’t have a backup of its contents but — before you start accusing me of carelessness — a backup wasn’t really necessary. When I purchased the iMac in mid-2018, I transferred the MacBook Pro’s data to it using Migration Assistant. In the end the actual data loss was fortunately limited to some stuff I had downloaded and/or archived in the Downloads folder. Overall, the failure of this SSD hasn’t been a catastrophic event.
Still, I found myself thinking about this a lot. Because it could have been. It could have been catastrophic. I thought about all those regular folks who are often told that SSDs are more reliable than hard drives; folks who are sometimes lulled into a false sense of security and think that backups with SSDs aren’t that urgent, after all.
In my 30+ years’ experience with computers, while I certainly have seen hard drives fail just as suddenly, in many cases their failure was progressive and gradual enough to allow the user to salvage at least some data. The original hard drive of my iMac G3 back in 2001 took almost three weeks to fail completely. I was able to salvage 95% of all the data I hadn’t backed up already. An SSD doesn’t give you a grace period; it’s like a lightbulb — one day you flip the switch and pop, it’s blown.
I don’t know enough about data retrieval when SSDs are involved. Maybe it’s easier to extract it from a dead SSD than it is from a dead hard drive. But the relatively recent practice on Apple’s part to ship computers with soldered flash storage just gives me cold sweats. Especially because if something else fails at the motherboard level, your data get compromised in the process. While you may get some assistance at an Apple Store for retrieving the data, the way Macs are designed internally today introduces — unnecessarily — new points of failure.
T2 chip and Catalina, your overprotectors
On this matter, I found a recent video from Louis Rossmann to be particularly illuminating. If you don’t know him, he runs a repair shop in New York City that specialises in Apple laptop repairs. On his YouTube channel he often posts videos showcasing specific repairs, and talks about the issues he encounters. He’s known to be opinionated, and he also uses his channel to talk about other things that aren’t strictly related to his job or to technology topics. He can be polarising, no doubt, but I don’t follow him for his opinions. I’m interested in his technical expertise.
Back to the video, it’s called An important message from Louis Rossmann but in the thumbnail you can see the more specific message: T2 + Catalina = No data! The video is short, 6 minutes, so I suggest you watch it in its entirety. The gist of it is that sometimes the firmware in the T2 security chip (which, if I’m not mistaken, is basically inside every Mac produced today except the iMac line) gets corrupted and that leads to corrupted data. Before Mac OS 10.15 Catalina shipped, Rossmann says, the problem was relatively easy to fix. Catalina, however, automatically opts you in enabling Secure Boot, a feature that, as the Apple Support page states, “make[s] sure that only a legitimate, trusted operating system loads at startup”.
“Now the problem here,” continues Rossmann, “is that if you enable Secure Boot, I can’t boot the machine into an external operating system in order to try and grab files off of your corrupted operating system the way that I used to, and I’m not able to access the drive as well via the ‘Lifeboat connector’ to get information off the soldered-on SSD because there is no more ‘Lifeboat connector’ after 2017.”
“Now, what’s really really bad here is that if you have Secure Boot enabled and your T2 firmware just decides [for] whatever reason it’s going to die, the only way that I can get the computer to work again is by… destroying all of your data. I need to erase it in order to get the computer to work again. But your data wouldn’t have been retrievable anyway, because the computer is dead. So, when the computer is dead your data is there, but to get the computer to not die, I need to erase your data. And what’s really bad with Catalina is that it seems to opt people into this by default. […] Every single customer that we have explained this to has said I don’t remember opting into that, I don’t remember choosing that”.
Rossmann’s suggestion to all people using Catalina is therefore to go and disable Secure Boot if they want to have a chance at recovering their data should a failure of the T2 chip occur.
I realise this doesn’t have much to do with my personal misadventure, but I thought it was a tangential subject worth mentioning. It’s another of those puzzling Apple decisions that make me less enthusiastic about a platform and an ecosystem I’ve been using and endorsing for decades. For now I’m pretty happy with my iMac + 11-inch MacBook Air setup (and the MacBook Pro is making a comeback with a new SSD and, soon, a new battery) and for now I feel I’ve dodged a bullet. But what about the next time, when a new upgrade will be inevitable down the road?
As I’ve already said several times, I still think a good strategy (for myself) is to get a new, separate Mac to run Mac OS Catalina and higher, while keeping the tried-and-trusted machines on High Sierra or Mojave.
But another part of the strategy — in general, and especially when getting a Mac with a T2 security chip — is to back everything up as often and as paranoically as possible. It’s infuriating to see that loss of data is a problem that doesn’t seem to go away as technology progresses (much like configuring printers, haha). What’s worse with SSDs is that loss of data is always sudden. Sure, you read that SSDs have a certain life expectancy and data can be read and written millions of times before degradation and failure, but there are so many factors at play that make SSDs possibly more unpredictable than hard drives. I don’t have valid statistical data here to use for meaningful comparisons, but 3 years and 3 months of normal use seems to be an awfully short lifespan for an SSD. I have two hard drives in a Power Macintosh 9500 that are more than 20 years old and have been operational 16 hours a day for at least 10 years, and they’re still working to this day.
Backup solutions
As for backups, my preferred strategy is still relying on manual operations combined with Time Machine backups and having the most crucial, must-not-be-lost data redundantly copied in the cloud. I feel particularly lucky because I’ve been using Time Machine since Mac OS X Leopard and I never had a problem with it. (No, really.) But Time Machine has proven to be particularly buggy with APFS and Catalina, so I wouldn’t recommend you rely entirely on it. Other trusted products I have used in the past and still use on specific occasions are SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. Both their developers have made heroic efforts to fight against Catalina’s quirks and bugginess in order to ensure the compatibility and reliability of their software solutions. I truly recommend these products without reserve.