I recently updated to macOS Big Sur, and I am having trouble with my external hard drive. The hard drive keeps randomly disconnecting from my Mac Pro so I can't really use the drive at all. Any one else have issues with that? It's WD Caviar Black 6 TB connected with the Orico USB3 dock. Thanks!
Mac Pro, macOS 11.0
OK, I have been doing some experiments and have not had a disconnection for a couple days. It appears (for me at least) as the trigger for the "DID NOT EJECT PROPERLY" event is when the Mac goes to sleep. I suspect it may be a combination of factors which I have not deciphered yet, including 1) Sleeping, 2) HHD, 3) TimeMachineBackup, and possibly marginal hardware.
By setting Energy Saver settings as follows and not manually entering sleep I have avoided the Disconnect for a couple days where it was reliably occurring at least once a day.
Can someone please try this and tell us if this works for you.
I am on an iMac where battery is not an issue so staying awake just wastes energy. This will have a more significant impact on Laptop users trying to conserve battery.
I have opened a Bug Report but it would be nice if Apple would at least acknowledge this is an issue that will be fixed. Apple?
Hi
I have two MacBooks pro both running Big Sur, one with old intel chip and the one with new m1 chip. Interestingly, I have no problem with MacBook pro with intel chip. Now, with the new MacBook pro m1 chip I had this problem of external hdd disconnecting (LaCie 5TB) while I was on battery mode. Off course, there is no option of preventing harddisks from sleeping while on battery mode. To try to solve this problem I did two things, connected my Macbook with power adapter and I restarted my Macbook. Only then, I could use my external hardisk with no disconnecting issues.
I've had this problem with an external G-Drive Mobile Pro Thunder Bolt 3 (WD/HGST) SSD (connected to powered Thunder Bolt dock) since the upgrade to Big Sur, and while I do think Big Sur kicked off the issue, I'm not convinced it is root cause. I rolled back to Catalina (a state in which the SSD worked perfectly), and it still disconnected... Apple engineers when through my 2018 Mac mini and couldn't find any cause. They say it isn't the Mac, WD/HGST says it's not the drive. They both can't be right... The consumer gets caught in the middle as usual.
I have to say that both Apple and WD/HGST support have been very responsive (actually I did have to chase down Apple engineering for the results of their root cause analysis). I'm on my 5th replacement drive and this one is brand new, kudos to WD/HGST support for their effort.
I've done a lot of troubleshooting and reconfiguration (including power), and as of today it appears to be working fine (it hasn't disconnected in 3 days), but I've seen this behavior before so, it still may...
It is possible that Big Sur did something to tweak power management at the system level. Power seems to be the most consistent thing that pops throughout all of the posts I've read since November 2020. It is a bus powered device, so I think it makes the most sense at this point. Mac mini doesn't have a battery, so I set everything to stay on, but when I've done that, it still disconnected... I've connected it directly to a TB3 port, the TB3 dock, and daisy chained off of a TB3 drive bay with the same behavior per each connection. The only difference is frequency of the disconnects. Recently, when connected to a powered device like the dock, it was disconnecting once per day-ish (vice 100 times per day). I did nothing, and no disconnects for the last 3 days. I'm going to set up a backup routine to keep the drive active for the next week or so and see what happens.
If no disconnects happen in the next week maybe 2, I'll feel much better about it.
I may have happened onto a possible solution for this issue.
Everything on my new iMac has been working pretty well as expected until I tried ripping some of my movies and CD's. I am using an external drive to rip my DVD's and CD's that is connected to a hub to do this. It just happens that I have 2 other external drives (for Music/TV and Time Machine backups) connected to the same hub. That hub is connected to one USB port on the Mac.
So during the ripping process, the Music and TV drive and/or the Backups drive would disconnect and dismount without notice. Disk Utility would not see the drives anymore and I would have to re-boot to get everything back.
The solution I seem to have found is to set the Energy Saver as noted in another reply AND to move the CD/DVD drive to a direct port on the Mac rather than through that hub. I've now gone a few hours and no strange dismounts and disconnects of those two drives.
No idea what your configuration looks like but thought this might help.
I dealt with a similar problem for months, and it seems I just found a solution. The affected drive was a G-Drive Mobile PRO TB3 SSD (bus powered).
Following the last big sur update, I found some info suggesting not to connect to a dock of any kind (it was always connected to a powered TB3 dock prior to the issue). I have an open TB port on my 2018 intel Mac Mini (same bus my eGPU is connected to), I connected the drive to that port a few days ago, and I haven't had a problem since...
Caveat: I think there are too many variables for one solution to apply across the board...
Thanks. Can't; these are small USB-powered drives. They have always worked and were never automatically ejected every few minutes.
Big Sur Disconnecting My External HDD
