External hard drive not working on the M1 Mac can be one of the outcomes of such incompatibility. The shift to M1 inevitably caused many incompatibility issues, both with software and hardware. The system monitoring app adds a SSD module to your menu bar, which lets you track SSD usage by disk - so you can check both internal and external SSD - and gives you useful insights such as SSD lifetime left. See the green lights? Good! Your SSD is doing great.Īnother tool that will help keep an eye on SSD (in real-time!) is iStat Menus.One way or another, we hope the issue is gone for good.īefore we move on to external SSD, let us share a quick method to check your internal SSD’s health - a great one to catch SSD issues early and generally stay in the know about your Mac’s health: Apple says the SSD monitoring tools didn’t work correctly, and some experts assume that the problem was caused by the difficult transition of Intel apps to Apple Silicon. Even though users stopped reporting it over time (many say, Apple has fixed the problem with macOS 11.4 update), there’s no doubt something was off - apparently, the amount of data written to the SSD was unusually large. The issue with SSD work on M1 Mac was a mysterious one. But suddenly, the SSD wear issue emerged, which clearly posed a major threat to M1 Macs. We all know Apple’s SSDs usually live long, and it’s hard to make them fail, so there might be nothing to worry about. Thus, Apple Silicon Mac won’t boot if the internal storage has failed.Īnd that would be that. To put it simply, 1TR ensures that your startup security information is stored internally - written to an internal 1TR partition. The policy is based on the so-called 1 True Recovery (1TR). This is due to the new security policy that completely reimagines M1 Mac’s boot and recovery process. Macs with the new all-the-rage Apple Silicon chips can’t boot macOS without a working internal SSD. ✕ Why M1 Mac can’t boot from external drive

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