Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Ejecting USB hard drive on sleep produces message about disk ejected improperly

When I sleep my iMac (macOS 10.14.2) with an older connected USB drive, it always wakes up with tons of messages about the disk being improperly ejected. It's never caused a problem but it's extremely annoying when there is dozens of these messages I have to close on wake-up. I've tried the setting Don't put hard disks to sleep, but that doesn't help. I haven't tried another USB drive. Any advice is appreciated.

Posted on Jan 1, 2019 7:15 AM

Reply

Similar questions

8 replies

Jan 1, 2019 11:22 AM in response to T S1

Hard drives draw power from either a wall socket, or from the USB bus. Hard drives drawing power from the bus—separately or in concert with the other devices that can also be connected to the USB—can sometimes exceed the available power on the bus. This can cause the ports to shut down, and devices can sometimes get confused. With hard disks, spin-up is usually the biggest power draw, too. Marginal bus power causes problems. Powered USB hubs and wall-powered storage devices can avoid excess bus power draw. And USB devices—new or old—don’t always play well together, and some can be quite flaky, or can sometimes be missing features that systems can expect.


In short, try powered USB hubs, and try different storage devices.

Jan 1, 2019 6:55 PM in response to T S1

Doesn’t surprise.


I’ve seen some utter junk during USB bus scans, some from well-known hardware vendors.


USB is a complex protocol. Not everybody gets it right, not all features get implemented, and there can be implementation bugs. Sometimes, the host and the device can disagree on how things should work.


Swap the HDD. Or maybe repurpose it to (for instance) network-attached storage on sme old x86-64 box, and use that for backups. Running FreeNAS, OwnCloud, NextCloud, etc.

Ejecting USB hard drive on sleep produces message about disk ejected improperly

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple ID.