Removing Samsung Portable SSD T1 Kernel Extensions from your Mac

Recently I purchased the 500 GB version of Samsung’s Portable SSD T1.

My plan was to run Windows 10 from it following this excellent guide.

Unfortunately, the Mac is unable to recognise the Samsung Portable SSD T1 as a boot drive. Holding option on boot does not offer the portable SSD as a boot device.

The Samsung Portable SSD T1

So far, adding external drives to Mac OS X never required any additional drivers.

This is different with the Samsung SSD T1. It ships with (optional) built-in support for encryption. For whatever reason, Samsung decided that the device needs to be activated prior to first usage.

When first attaching the drive, you don’t have access to the full capacity. Instead, a 130 MB partition containing the Samsung activation software for Windows and Mac OS X is exposed. (No Linux support.)

The software allows you to give the drive a name and optionally turn encryption on.

Then it gets ugly: Samsung installs a Kernel Extension and Launch Deamon to your system, which is a bad idea. It might cause trouble, when newer versions of Mac OS X become available, and Samsung might not make required updates available in time.

Interestingly enough, the software seems to be only required in case you want to make use of Samsung’s built-in encryption. However, you have to install it at least once, even if you don’t want encryption at all.

This seems to be a very weird decision on Samsung’s side.

The “good” thing: Once you’ve “activated” the Samsung Portable SSD T1 once and decide to not make use of the encryption feature, it is absolutely safe to manually remove all of the Samsung T1 software from your system.

The device will continue to work just fine.

Here is how. Open Terminal and submit the following commands (on Mac OS X El Capitan):

1. sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/SATSMARTDriver.kext
2. sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/SATSMARTLib.plugin
3. rm ~/Library/LaunchDemons/com.srib.pssddaemon.plist
4. rm ~/Library/PortableSSD/Samsung Portable SSD

You might want to move the Samsung activation software to another location, in case you ever need it again.

mv ~/Library/Application Support/PortableSSD ~/backup

As always: Use at your own risk.

So far, I was unable to get the Samsung Portable SSD T1 external USB hard drive to show up as a Startup Disk. Hence booting a Mac from the Samsung T1 seems impossible.

Should anybody have a solution, please do leave a comment!

I’m also available on Twitter.