After years of feeling confident in my computer skills, moving from Mojave to Monterey has presented me with a whole new learning curve. This is the latest:

I bought a NVMe SSD after reading about how fast they were and hoped to achieve a bootable Monterey backup for my iMac. The photos on Amazon had not prepared me for how tiny this storage is. It's a 1 Tb SSD that I formatted in APFS with three volumes: a Monterey backup, a Mojave backup (which is bootable) and a data volume all in an enclosure not much bigger than my thumb. I was surprised to see the measurements of space remaining pertains to the whole drive, not the individual volumes. I guess the volumes/partitions have flexible borders to accommodate needs. Clever.

I attached the drive directly to one of the Thunderbolt ports. I had to reset PRAM to get the computer to acknowledge the new SSD. Carbon Copy Cloner works twice as fast on this NVMe SSD now that things are up and running.

One surprise is that DriveDX will not see the NVMe drive. I have an app called iStat Menus that can see all drives and all the parts of the Monterey drives (iMac HD, iMac HD - Data, Preboot, VM, Update) but apparently, SMART status is not supported on the NVMe drive. Disk Utility says SMART status is not supported, although is supported on the internal startup NVMe SSD. Does anyone know the best way to keep tabs on the "health" of this SSD?

Thanks.


iMac (19,1, 3.1 GHz i5, 12.7.4, 40 Gb RAM); MacBook Air (1.8 Ghz, 8 Gb RAM, 10.14.6, 256 Gb SSD) Vodafone router and Devolo Wi-Fi Extender, Canon TS8351 printer/scanner.