I have my M2 mini booting off a 1 TB Crucial USB SSD
DriveDX says it is not SMART enabled yet if I then reboot the mini onto its own internal SSD, DriveDX recognises the Crucial drive and provides a report.
This is all I get when the mini is booted from the Crucial.
Any idea why this happens?
I have checked all the “suggestions” in the troubleshooting section at the top.
It also occurs with other computers.
Mac mini, macOS 14.6
Did you manually install the special USB driver while booted from the external Crucial SSD? I can imagine the possibility that DriveDx may not consider it a USB device since it is the boot drive so DriveDx may not prompt you to install the special USB driver. I have never tried to check the SMART status of an external drive while booted from that same external drive with macOS.
macOS does not have the necessary USB SCSI driver needed to communicate with external drives, so the third party driver is needed.
It is SMART enabled and DriveDX can access it and create a report but not when it is booting the mini.
When the mini is booted "normally" from its own SSD the Crucial works with DriveDX.
It's no big deal to boot from the mini when I want to check the Crucial but it really shouldn't be necessary.
Hmm...🤔 That is interesting.
My experience has been that my external drives don't usually report SMART status, and I've not cared enough about it to pursue it further. But this is intriguing.
I think this sounds like a great question to pose to the DriveDX folks. I'd wager they could explain the behavior.
I'll be following this for sure.
Thanks but I had done that already . . . this has been going on for several years with different computers.
Anyway I downloaded the driver again and installed it on both the Mac SSD and the Crucial SSD (both of which are bootable).
I have DriveDX installed on both those bootable drives and whilst booted into the Crucial SSD I tried the DriveDX installed on both drives but neither would recognise the Crucial.
So although the Crucial (and other external SSDs) are recognised when booted into the Mac SSD, the externals are no longer recognised when one of them is booting the Mac.
I can't imagine Binary Fruit has had this problem before because not many people dual boot their Macs.
Incidentally the Crucial (in DriveDX) is showing that it still has 99% of its lifespan remaining which suggests it should be good for over another century! The Mac SSD has only written some 500 GB in the last year as pretty well everything has been done on the Crucial.
According to the good folks at OWC, ❝...external and USB drives are not usually SMART-enabled.❞
Please ref: Here is How to Check SMART Status of Your Mac Drives - eshop.macsales.com
DriveDX says SSD is not SMART enabled BUT . . .
