Does it not show up in Disk Utility either? If it shows up there it’s just not mounted. No idea why that would be though. Never seen anything like that myself.
Should be much faster than a regular cheap stick. You can get something like Blackmagic Disk Speed Test for free on the App Store if you want to check. This SSD should be giving you something like ~400 MB/s. My old sticks do maybe 25 MB/s.
Forgot Disk Utility! I just left it for over an hour opened to a VM - both machines went to sleep and it woke up ok. I usually don’t keep drives plugged into this machine, and I rarely reboot, so maybe the issue has been there all along.
I actually bought a drive dock from OWC over Thanksgiving so I’ll try it in there too.
I can say it’s way faster than the original drive from my 2008 unibody that I used for TurboTax over the summer. That was a “boot and take a nap” drive!
Thanks for your help!
Diane
Even more interesting… I setup the dock, rebooted the laptop, and it selected the drive in the dock as a boot drive. (the Kingston)
I rebooted a few times and that was fine.
I reset the startup disk to the internal drive, and I can see the Kingston on every reboot now. So it’s something in the external case or the cable they sent, and I’m not sure I have another cable like that to experiment with. I will request a swap on that and use the drive in the dock until then. 
Plus now that I opened the dock box, I can start the project of going through drives I keep finding =:0
Diane
Yeah, if you can confirm this is cable or case related, I would ask for a replacement. If it fails again, go with another make.
One year later…
I am ordering TurboTax and they’ve upped the OS requirement for the second (or third) year in a row. They want Catalina now.
Last year I setup a bootable Sierra drive which is sitting in a dock. I think I had Parallels, VMWare on it, but couldn’t buy the versions I needed to run off Sierra, so I went with VirtualBox (running Mojave). The remnants of all the other systems are still on the drive though, and it’s only got 60gb free, so I’m going to buy another drive and just do VirtualBox on it. I don’t think I have enough room to install a Catalina partition.
But please refresh my memory - I do need to install a base OS on the drive to start with, right? I have always installed VB on existing bootable drives but don’t know if I need to.
Thanks
Diane
Shouldn’t be necessary…you didn’t say what your boot drive is but as long as it will run VirtualBox you can install VB on the internal drive and just put the Catalina container virtual rice on the external drive. I haven’t tried any virtual machines since I got my M1 Pro MBP but AFAIK you can’t run Windows in a VM on an M1 Pro machine yet/or perhaps ever.
I’m currently running Sierra on a full internal drive. I’m upgrading that drive and I think that will force it to go to HS.
VB is running on my internal, pointing to a Mojave container on the external. (I’d forgotten that, I thought it was all on the external)
So I think that’s all I need to do, just put a new container on the new drive.
Considering TurboTax may be on a kick to increase the OS yearly, what size do you suggest? At this point, this is all I will have on there though I may need to install Quickbooks at some point.
Thanks again,
Diane
In the December 2021 MacLife magazine, there is a review of the new Parallels Desktop 17 version which indicates that it can run certain ARM Insider Preview versions of Windows 10 and 11 on an M1 Mac. The following article from another site discusses that as well:
I can’t run anything other than VirtualBox, since they won’t sell me the version that works with Sierra. Last year when I tried, they were one version behind it. Too bad as it was easy to set up.
Diane
I was hoping we had a VB specific thread, but I can’t seem to find one, so I’m adding to mine.
I bought another 480gb SSD to setup new VB’s on. The Mojave one that I did last year seems to be running out of room so I thought I’d start over. I only allocated 30gb to it.
On the new drive, I’ve made a 50gb Mojave VB that seems to be working fine. No apps installed yet, it has 39gb free.
Then I duplicated that one, and upgraded it to Catalina. Slow slow slow. I’ve upped the RAM to 6gb on both partitions and am using 2 processors. I’m wondering if it needs more than 50gb. It has 35gb free at the moment (no apps there either).
Both VBs will probably just have Quickbooks and TurboTax.
Am I correct that you can’t increase drive space to the VB once it’s created?
Any suggestions to improve speed and responsiveness? Should I just make both partitions 75gb or so?
Running on an external SSD off an early 2015 MBPr, still running Sierra (hopefully upgrading the drive and to HS soon)
Thanks
Diane
If you’re looking for a very fast, high-quality external SSD, I can recommend the Samsung T5. They come in various sizes (and colors!). I have two of them, each 1T. I have 10.14.6 on all of the drives and have been running my iMac (which has a mechanical internal drive) from one of the T5s for a couple of years now. It’s much faster than the internal drive even over a USB3 connection. These drives vary in price, but I purchased mine for under $200 apiece (maybe $150, something like that).
You can get up to four times faster speed (20Gbps) from a TB2 connected SSD than any USB drive with your model MBPr.
Mine’s a little convoluted at the moment. I’d bought an external case last year that didn’t work well (it would unmount itself when the laptop went to sleep). So I ended up using a drive docking station (that I’d bought to clean up old hard drives) which is plugged into a Wavelink docking station. I’ll look into a way to change that, thanks!
Diane
ps - I think this is kind of a unicorn these days, and pretty expensive. There is a reasonably priced TB3 enclosure but I don’t see TB2 for under a few hundred.
Diane
Check to be certain, but a TB3 drive should be backward compatible with TB2.
I thought so, but the few I looked at had hard wired cables and the ends look different?
Not sure if an adapter TB 3 to TB 2 would work (though that would be MDP, wouldn’t it?)
Diane
Maybe. The data formats will all be compatible (with an adapter), but Apple’s TB2-TB3 adapter only moves data, not power.
Which means you can’t use the adapter with a bus-powered device. Only with self-powered devices (that is, those that have their own power adapters.)
Absolutely, as long as your TB3 enclosure is powered.