Slow boot from external mac os 26.1

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Level 1

5 points

Slow boot from external mac os 26.1

Hi everyone, for some time now I've noticed a huge slowdown in the startup of my Mac Studio M2 from an external NVMe of this type Crucial P3 4TB M.2 PCIe Gen3 NVMe Installed on ORICO Case SSD M.2 NVMe 40Gbps USB4 Thunderbolt up to 2800 MB/s from M.2 and connected to the rear ports of the studioAs you can see in the log I am attaching, there is a two-minute pause.I would like to understand what it does and why.I connected two HDDs to the two USB ports for Time Machine backups.

any ideas?

tks!

log.log

Mac Studio, macOS 26.1

Posted on Nov 20, 2025 12:32 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 20, 2025 7:03 AM in response to FidelS.80

One possibility is that with Tahoe, macOS enables FileVault by default (System Settings > Privacy & Security > FileVault). With the internal storage, data are already encrypted even without FileVault (on Macs that are compatible with Tahoe), and because the encryption is hardware-level the decryption is effectively instantaneous so all FileVault does is incorporate the login password into the cryptographic key.

It may be that Tahoe enabling FileVault encrypted your external drive, and the lag is due to the decryption at login.

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Answer 2

FidelS.80 Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 20, 2025 9:44 AM in response to neuroanatomist

another boot

Thanks for your reply. I checked and filevalut is disabled.

Also, before turning it off, I left it off for about an hour, then turned it on and it took a good 3 minutes!

I am attaching another log. I ran an SOS on all the disks and it didn't find anything.

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