Peripherals
Thinking inside the box to refresh the parts other tips can’t reach
Quick-fire questions
Why does my external hard drive panic my Mac?
> This occurs when the hard drive has a fatal hardware fault and is about to fail. When you connect the drive, an unrecoverable error occurs as it’s mounted, causing a kernel panic in the Mac, which restarts. That external drive is now dead.
Does an external SSD need fan cooling?
> Faster SSDs generate heat, particularly when performing sustained large writes. If an SSD is connected via Thunderbolt/USB 4, its enclosure needs to dissipate heat using a high surface area with deep fins. Fans require a heatsink on the SSD and good internal design, and may not be as effective as fins.
Join two SSDs into one drive
Q How can I join two 4TB NVMe SSDs in one external Thunderbolt enclosure to use as a single drive?
by STEVE EVANS
A There are three basic schemes you can use to join two drives into a single storage unit: concatenate them into a disk set using JBOD (‘just a bunch of disks’), combine them into a RAID 0 striped set, or turn them into a mirrored RAID 1 set.