The Problem

Six months ago, my Mac Mini began experiencing silent restarts after entering sleep mode. Initially, these incidents were sporadic and difficult to diagnose, but they gradually became more frequent, eventually occurring during active use. The random nature of these restarts made troubleshooting particularly challenging.

Initial Troubleshooting Steps

Following standard troubleshooting practices, I began with the most common solutions: rebooting and reinstalling macOS. Unfortunately, these approaches proved ineffective. The system continued to restart unexpectedly despite a clean OS installation.

Root Cause Analysis

After analyzing the crash reports with assistance from ChatGPT 😏, I identified the underlying issue. The panic logs revealed a firmware problem with the internal SSD:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xfffffe001f136eec): ANS2 Recoverable Panic - assert failed: [11194]:MSP 0 asserted: assert 14838, args: 5 134807552 134807552!!!! - Timer(14)
...
MSP FW Version: s5e.ofw.toshiba_tlc_3d_g5_2p_512gb-4.12.2.0.0.0

I was like 🤷 as I thought I thought of many possibilities but didn’t see this coming. ChatGPT suggests couple methods to verify if the hardware is cooked:

  • ✅ EtreCheck Pro
  • ✅ Apple Diagnostics
  • ✅ Disk Utility First Aid on the internal SSD

Surprisingly, all diagnostic tools reported no hardware issues, suggesting the problem was firmware-related rather than hardware failure.

The Solution

Since the issue appeared to be firmware-related and my macOS was already up to date, traditional firmware updates weren’t available. When I was thinking if I should just get used to this new normal, I wonder if I can just put the internal SSD into ice box so it can never be a trouble maker. Gladly Disk Utility allows us to unmount the internal SSD which is better than deleting the whole volume group (not sure what will happen though ChatGPT says it is fine).

After 24 hours of stable operation, the system appears to be functioning normally without any unexpected restarts. While I’m cautiously optimistic that this solution has resolved the issue, I’ll continue monitoring the system’s behavior. If the problem resurfaces, I’ll update this post with additional findings and potential solutions.