Sierra and USB3 HDD & Hub Hell

Haven't been here in a dogs age but I have a nasty issue that appears to more more an issue with DAW setups than casual use so I figure this'd be a good place to ask.

Sierra does not like USB3 HDD's or USB3 hubs connected. I have never experience the crippling done to my system by way of merely connecting these items.... mouse won't work, audio interface won't work or connect, startup crashes, kernel crashes, software not working or behaving very oddly/badly.

USB2 drives work. I've lookup up this issue and I'm not alone. Ever since Yosemite some report, it seems USB3 has s*** the bed.

I just went to Sierra from Mavericks a few weeks back. Since I can't use a hub, I'm connecting keyboard/mouse, various controllers, Waves & iLok dongles in the usb ports of my displays.

I should add that the external hdd's having issues are in their own cases, which especially Seagate enclosures, can be a bit problematic in the first place but these problems are different and way severe.

Again, connecting a usb2 hdd doesn't cause problems. Recently I needed to boot from an external.....usb3 wouldn't let me but a usb2 drive would.

The exception to all this is an OWC 2 bay usb3 dock for bare drives that I have 2 drives in there for all my audio content and sample streaming. That sucker works knock on wood.

Any one else having issues like this?

Using USB 3 stuff all day in El Capitan.

There shouldn't be an issue because your 2012 Mac Mini has native USB 3.

Make sure you're not trying to boot to a drive that is FAT32 or NTFS. Only Mac OSX Extended.

Seagate external drives are the worst. I had issues with those.

I buy bare drives and USB 3 enclosures from OWC. They work great.

I had found a developer discussion page at apple that was all about this issue. Sometimes I like to use enclosed drives for archiving stuff I have collected if just for the ergonomics of them. Oddly enough I tend to find that enclosed drives of a particular size are less expensive than the same size drive bare.

I forgot to say.... just having a hub connected to the mini without anything plugged into it caused problems!

I had to buy a bunch of new hdd's to replace ones that got trashed in a vehicle accident and recover the files over to. They're new so right now I hate to rip the enclosures open to get at the drives.

However, good idea... I'll go look at OWC enclosures get a second 2 bay dock.

All the drives I do use in the operation of my DAW are from OWC