Catalina - External Hard Drives repeatedly ejected without cause.

Anyone want to give this a go and report back? Preventing spotlight from indexing the external drive...

I found this old apple discussion with the same issue on Yosemite with a confirmed solution. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6607988

1. Connect the volume or drive you want excluded to your Mac.

2. Open the System Preferences application.

3. Click on Spotlight, then click on the Privacy tab.

4. Drag your volume or drive into the Privacy menu to exclude them from Spotlight's indexing.

Ladies & gents - I have found a cure.

After posting on here, contacting Apple chat support (who advised on checking if my thunderbolt 1 WD 4TB drive was 32-bit it 64-bit compatible) I contacted WD support.

Within Catalina, I uninstalled all software & remnants relating to WD, then rebooted.

I then downloaded & installed :-

WD Discovery

WD Utilities

WD Security

from the WD website

Rebooted the system

WD 4TB external Thunderbolt 1 drive is now connected, fully working, transferring & backing up data as it should.

Instead of it ejecting like it was doing after a few minutes, Now every 5 to 10 minutes, there is a slight pause of data transfer, as something refreshes in the background, but the drive remains mounted and fully working.

One thing that might be worth trying, is with OnyX. In desperation, with two backup drives refusing to mount, and after one of my main data drives coming up as unformatted multiple times, being restored multiple times (six in total), and even being replaced and doing the same thing, but it did allow me to use the drives again. I ran the maintenance scripts in OnyX. I only discovered this after loosing the data on the data drive. I am slowly restoring this drive from the cloud, because on top of the random ejects and the drive coming up as unformatted multiple times, my Time Machine backup failed as well. It said it was backing up, but there were no files actually being saved! I have no idea why running those maintenance scripts worked, but I do know they clear a number of caches, so I am assuming that one of these must have got corrupted at some point. Here is a link to download OnyX: https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html and a screenshot of the options that were selected. I didn't change any of these from the defaults as far as I'm aware.

Phoned apple business support - temporary solution found

They know of the issue and the official 'fix' is to go into Energy Saver preferences and untick the 'put drives to sleep when possible' option.

I've done that and the problem has stopped.

BUT IT IS NOT A FIX, APPLE - I have a local RAID array and fast studio drive in my editing workflow. Turning off power saver features and spin downs means I can now do my work, but that my drives will stay spun up all the time.

This means they will use more power, and wear out more quickly. Before the update, a task could take 4 or more hours to complete (say a documentary length video piece rendering at 4k from 6k). I could do something else or go to bed while this happened, knowing that as soon as the task completed, power management would spin the drives down - this is no longer the case. I'd consider this issue 'fixed' when normal power management behaviours are restored.

I had exactly the same problem. External SSD worked fine if I moved to my MacBook, just not working on my Mac Pro. Tried everything before that, cable, different USB port, yada yada. I remembered though that it started occurring after I turned on my screen saver and moved my screen setting in energy saver from 15 minutes to 1 hr. I reversed this and the problem stopped.

The MacBook didn't have screen saver turned on. Running Catalina, OS 10.15.6 beta, late 2017 Mac Pro. I have tested it back and forth and as soon as I turn on the screen saver and wait for it to go into screen saver mode, when I click the mouse for it to come on, there is the "disk was not properly ejected" message. The screen saver option is "Drift". Didn't try any others so not necessarily tied to this particular one. Too bad, I really like this screen saver.

Hi! I have the same problem with my Lacie 2big 6tb Thunderbolt 2 (aka my disk) too. Moreover, each time my disk was ejecting Finder was not responding and the only way to restart my imac 2012 was to hard reset. Otherwise I was seeing black screen of death (I have seen it many many times unfortunately). Following your suggestions I have bought a new thunderbolt cable (dod not help) and then I have installed Mojave on my second SSD and miracle! my disk appeared on desktop being successfully mounted. It worked!!! and I began thinking how to downgrade from Catalina to Mojave. But after hour or two the same problem appeared - disk ejected. So, in y case Mojave did not help. So, I just replaced thunderbolt cable with usb 3.0 and now it is just OK. The downgrade in speed (from 300 mb/s to 270 mb/s) is fine for me. Now I have two thunderbolt cables free ))) To be honest I was always under impression Thunderbolt is a killing feature from Apple, so I am absolutely discouraged how this problem can happen and not addressed by Apple men.

my iMac Pro updated last night to Catalina 10.15.4 and now i'm getting this too. it's making my photoshop work nearly impossible because of scratch disks. i have tried multiple drives with multiple enclosures, as well as all the other solves in this thread to no avail.

I did just download Keep Drive Spinning and selected all but my time machine drive and so far none of my 4 drives have ejected.

Hi

As an update to my previous post : -

I have a mac mini 2012, everything was fine until Catalina... the latest update.

All usb drives work fine, as they always have - I have Seagate, WD.

Firewire drive works fine as it always has, WD.

The only issue was with WD 4TB Thunderbolt 1 - it worked fine until Catalina latest update, after contacting Apple, and WD, I uninstalled all WD software, rebooted, did all the SMC & P-RAM suggestions...

After re-installing the WD software, the drive worked fine ( or so I thought ) for about an hour or so, then ejected...

Plugged in the drive - it worked, it ejected..

It would appear that after a certain amount of time, the drive ejects - and it was something to do with a 'Refresh' / 'Timeout' as it started happening after the same amount of time had elapsed..

I uninstalled the WD software again, and all packages to do with WD - this time using a Third party uninstaller to 'Clean' erase all traces of WD software packages.

Since then, the drive has been fine, no ejects, no slowing down of the system as something refreshes in the background, no timeouts, and luckily I have managed to retrieve all of my data....

:-D

Latest update from me, regarding my WD thunderbolt drive ejecting after Catalina update :-

I knew this was familiar... Quite a while ago a software update killed off non-Apple branded lightning cables, all was working fine until the software update.

Now the same thing with Catalina, my WD thunderbolt drive was working fine until the Catalina update, a few different things remedied this, removal of WD software, Re-installation of WD software, OS tweaks etc - but bit by bit the thunderbolt cable became less usable.. I bought an APPLE 0.5M cable -and wow instantly back to fully working...

Tut tut tut Apple, following in the way of in-built obsolescence via software updates, similar to how Microsoft and Adobe used to promote the latest iterations of their 'New, More powerful, better' versions of their software, which were actually worse than their predecessors.

Apple must have had a backlog of cables sitting around and needed to sell them off quick smart. :-/

Happy to report that my drives have been working perfectly since I uninstalled WD software. There may be unsupported software also creating issues.

Hello PeterRobin1,

Thanks for visiting Apple Support Communities,

I understand that your external hard discs are ejecting at random. The following guide detailing how to reset the System Management Controller should be helpful:

How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac

Best regards.

I am having the same issue. I'm running an iMac Late 2014. My external Thunderbolt drive was working fine using Catalina 10.15.1 and the issue started with upgrade to 10.15.3. My external drive is a WD Velociraptor 2TB Thunderbolt. My USB attached drives work fine. Tried running WD Drive diagnostics and Apple First Aid checks all passing with no issues. I have also tried resetting the SMC, moving data off the drives, re-formatting, and copy data back. I tried creating a test user to rule out issues with my user profile, no change, still have the problem. I purchased a Thunderbolt to USB-C/Thunderbolt-3 adapter to test the cable, drive enclosure, and drives. When connected to a Macbook Pro running Catalina 10.15.1 there are no issues or random drive ejects. This tells me that my cable and Velociraptor are working just fine. To rule out 10.15.3 I plan to try upgrading the Macbook Pro and if I can re-create the issue, if yes, then I will need to wait for an update and hope Apple fixes what is looking more and more like a bug in Catalina 10.15.3. I opened ticket with Apple, if for nothing else to officially log the issue.

so, i think this is what is going based on my experiences with my iMac pro...

I had a 4 bay drive dock that I have used for years with no issues. Then, about a month ago, I started getting the same error as everyone else.

As I've read through the responses, I've seen some clues here and there. Some people had their drives on TB3, some on USB 3.

My current success is this: I took all but one drive out of my enclosure and got a USB A to C cable for the dock so it would plug into a thunderbolt port.. Success for a few days, so I added another drive into the dock. Success again for a few days. I added a third drive and IMMEDIATELY got the ejecting issue.

I grabbed another 2 bay dock and popped the third drive into it and plugged it into the USB port. Third drive is working great, no ejecting issues.

I'm about to try the 4th drive in the second dock, but this is my hypothesis:

There is something limiting the number of drives per bus. I don't know why or how, but it seems limiting to one or two drives per bus helps.

100% agreed

jonathanfrommahwah wrote:

I've since downgraded to Mojave, not an issue now.... 100% a Catalina issue. If the drives are part of your daily workflow I would HIGHLY recommend reverting to Mojave. In general so much better IMO.

May have found a solution. The drive has not ejected for over 12 hours so far. I have installed software called 'Mountain' by Appgineers.de which manages external drives. Cost is £4.49. https://appgineers.de/mountain/index.html In the prefs, I checked 'Prevent Unmount' in 'Customise'. So far, it's working. Fingers crossed. I will update next week to let you know how it goes.