In reply to a post by zyborg47:

What are you on about a DVI- HDMI cable is not rare, I have one here, not really used now, it is connected to the second monitor just in case.

I've got a few of them, such as this one.

VESA's DVI is a legacy standard, but is usefully electrically compatible with HDMI, whereas DisplayPort (DP) over either original, mini-DP or USB-C connectors is a electrically very different.

Lots of 2010 to 2016 or so era screens did not have HDMI ports due to the royalties the owner (rumoured to be Intel) charged, so VGA, DP and DVI were common on many makes of screen from Dell, Acer, ASUS, and others.

I just did a testing the Lightroom's new AI-driven Denoise tool. Same photo (the Intel has an archive of my library)

Intel Mac mini (2018) 8GB RAM. 7 minutes.

M2 Pro (2023) 16GB RAM - 25 seconds.

Wow, that is amazing, ok so there is a 5-year difference in the age of the machines, but that is still impressive.


i am hoping I have solved a annoying thing. I have a dock that has a hard drive in, but now and again it would vanish, which was annoying if trying to get a document from it. I would either have to unplug it from the mac and plug it back in or reboot the mac.
what I have done is moved the user directory onto it, hoping that because the mac uses it a lot, it will keep it alive. It is not slowing down the computer at all, so we will see. At the moment the activity light is flashing like hell, so it shows how much the mac access the user directory.

What is strange is that it don't happen with the large 8TB external drive I have connected to the hub on the monitor and then in turn to the mac, that will keep going with no problem at all.

Just a question, do you turn your Mac mini off or put it to sleep?

That seems a bit of an extreme solution to me. Did you do the basic troubleshooting of running Disk Utility's first aid over the volume? A volume not mounting is usually a sign of problems with the volume. I'd be twitchy about putting my user directory onto a disk I'm not convinced about. What format is the volume? APFS or HFS+?

(BTW, only format a new drive with it plugged directly into the Mac. Doing it via hub can do irrecoverably bad things to a new drive.)

For all I love about the Mac, I've always had issues with USB drives getting disconnected randomly (across four different Macs and lots of different drives/caddies). Sadly I don't know how to fix that issue.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

That seems a bit of an extreme solution to me. Did you do the basic troubleshooting of running Disk Utility's first aid over the volume? A volume not mounting is usually a sign of problems with the volume. I'd be twitchy about putting my user directory onto a disk I'm not convinced about. What format is the volume? APFS or HFS+?

disk utility would not make any difference, the drive is fine, it is in a dock that is connected to the USB 3c. something like what is in the picture via this link. Space inside for two drives, a SSD and NvME.

it will mount, but if it is not used for a while it will just vanish.

The idea did not work anyway, it works fine while the machine is in use, but when in sleep mode, the drive still don't come back

(BTW, only format a new drive with it plugged directly into the Mac. Doing it via hub can do irrecoverably bad things to a new drive.)

The drive connected to the monitor hub have been reformatted as extFat, but was done via the plugging it into the dock and it is fine

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

For all I love about the Mac, I've always had issues with USB drives getting disconnected randomly (across four different Macs and lots of different drives/caddies). Sadly I don't know how to fix that issue.

The one connected to the monitor is a large spinney drive, so has it own PSU. the dock also has a PSU, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. You would have thought Apple would have sorted out that problem by now.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

You would have thought Apple would have sorted out that problem by now.

It's been happening to me intermittently for at least the last 3 or 4 versions of the OS, the same number of computers (all iMacs) and any number of hard drives (mostly WD) both with and without hubs. Doesn't happen often, but when it happens I find power cycling the drive gets it back again. Doubtless other ways would work, but on my setup that's the easiest one to get at

Edited by billford (Sat 22-Apr-23 22:29:11)

In reply to a post by billford:

It's been happening to me intermittently for at least the last 3 or 4 versions of the OS, the same number of computers (all iMacs) and any number of hard drives (mostly WD) both with and without hubs. Doesn't happen often, but when it happens I find power cycling the drive gets it back again. Doubtless other ways would work, but on my setup that's the easiest one to get at

Not really possible to power cycle the drive in the dock as there is no switch apart from unplugging it.
I have tried something in the terminal to change how long it takes to put the drive in sleep mode, changed to a maximum of 1410065408 something or other it may work. I put the user folder back as default
I checked the cables, the PSU, it all works. so we will see

My feeling is that there's a flaw (if it can be called that) in the way Apple handle USB. Some reading around suggests that they may implement the USB protocols 100.00% to the letter, but of course this means there's no flexibility and as not everybody else is quite so pernickety this can lead to some interesting effects... not usually to the benefit of the user

True? No idea, but it could explain a lot.