External Drives in Monterey

I’ve just had a success with a very simple fix. My external drive got to the point that it was disconnecting every few seconds. 

The problem: It was dirt in the connectors. 

Solution:

• I disconnected the cable at both ends.
• Blew out with a sharp burst of breath the female connectors in the body of my MBP and the port in the external disc, and
• Blew out the insides of the USB-C male connectors.
• Reconnected everything.

That was two days ago, and the external disc has not disconnected since then.

I have no explanation for the differences in cables, I followed a suggested remedy that worked for me. Another user suggested trying certified USB cables. I looked at what was shipped with the drives (LaCie and WD), they had the correct stamping and labeling that indicates that they were certified. However, I bought two new cables, nothing fancy (Amazon basics and some other vendor called Plugable) with the USB-IF certification (like the old ones). I haven’t had a mounting problem since. My M1 mini seems to have delayed mounting, but they do mount reliably. Intel Mini 2018 i7 seems to be more consistent.

so, I was working on my father's iphone 8 a few days ago, and connected it via usb cable to my 15" macbook pro (2015)

It kept mounting and dismounting, and charging seemed to be cycling, lasting only a second or two before cycling again.

I thought it was perhaps a dodgy cable, so of course tried another. Same same.

Thought then it must be the phone (bought s/hand) so tried my phone (8+), same same (I usually charge my phone via wireless charger, so hadn't noticed this issue before).

Then tried father's phone with first cable in my 2012 17" macbook pro, all hunky-dory and fine. My phone, hunky dory

After doing some googling, I found someone who recommended this command line prompt to try to resolve the issue, and it worked - it would then charge and remain mounted on the 15" 'book

sudo killall -STOP -c usbd

I wondered if this daemon might also be affecting the sd card slot reader, since it is also usb (internal), so I mounted the sd card on the 15".

That was 3 days ago, and it hasn't unmounted since. Could be unrelated and merely coincidental, serendipitous good fortune, but might be worth a try.

As usual, I recommend not trying with anything that has data that cannot be replaced.

Cheers!

Try the following;

1 - boot into Safe Mode according to How to use safe mode on your Mac and test to see if the problem persists. Reboot normally and test again.

2 - log into a basic admin user account, Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac,  and see if the problem persists. This tells us if the problem is limited to your user account or is system wide.

Maggot wrote:

Hi Lawrence Finch,

Thanks for this. Chinig back in. I'm on an 2020 iMac (20,1) so not an M1 chipset — I should have mentioned that earlier.

Not sure where to check if my drives are configured to not shut down when the Mac is idle. Would you let me know where I can check if this option is or isn't selected? (FWIW, both drives — the afflicted Time Machine drive and the other, which backs up my Photos — continue to blink even if the iMac got to sleep. The drives are 4TB (July 2020 build) and 2TB (Nov 2019 build) G-Drive mobile USB-C externals, with the 4TB drive being the problematic one. (Identical except for capacity and build date, BTW. Formatted Journaled HFS+.)

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I hope Lawrence won't mind me butting in, but the setting is in 'System Preferences:Battery:Battery/Power Adapter:Put hard disks to sleep when possible'

At least that is so on my macbook - it may be 'System Preferences:Energy Saver (that was the old name):Put hard disks to sleep when possible' on a desktop machine.

Hi musota,

Thanks! It's an iMac (not a laptop) but in Preferences>Energy Saver "Put Hard Disks to Sleep When Possible" is checked. (I didn't make the connection that this could put ALL disks to sleep; I assumed this only applied to the iMac's internal drive.)

As another data point, the built-in SD card reader in my mid 2015 Macbook Pro stopped working when I upgraded to Monterey. I've tried everything that has been suggested, including SMC reset etc, and the OS just doesn't recognise it. I've tried multiple SD and micro-SD cards that work perfectly well in other devices.

Then I plugged in an external USB SD card reader, and that works just fine, so it's just the built-in reader, it's nothing to do with SD cards themselves.

Seems pretty clearly to be a bug, just have to wait for them to fix it.

this ain't my first rodeo, brother. Did I mention 30 years?

30 years old ain't a lot of experience.

Booting into Safe Mode does the following:

• Verifies your startup disk and attempts to repair directory issues, if needed ⬅︎ ⬅︎ ⬅︎

• Loads only required kernel extensions (prevents 3rd party kernel/extensions from loading) ⬅︎ ⬅︎ ⬅︎

• Prevents Startup Items and Login Items from opening automatically

• Disables user-installed fonts 

• Deletes font caches, kernel cache, and other system cache files ⬅︎ ⬅︎ ⬅︎

So when you boot into safe mode just immediately reboot normally and see if there's any improvement.

A simple workaround is to not sleep the computer but just put the screen to sleep. What with SSDs they don't need to be put to sleep like rotational HDs do to extend life.

" I have 4 external physical drives, 2 of them partitioned into 2 virtual drives for a total of 6 accessible external drives. And 2 of them are Time Machine drives. None of them ever disconnect. "

I think you mean you have 6 volumes, but let's not split hairs, that's still a decent number of attached drives for the following.

Lawrence, genuine questions to help narrow the issue;

Are your drives powered externally, that is to say 3.5" drives in enclosures, or even 2.5" drives off of a powered hub (and yes, I cringe at bringing hubs back into this, but it is/they are relevant here)?

My suspicion is that a bug in os12 is occasionally cutting power to the internal usb hub rail in the macbook, which would of course be the same as yanking the usb cable/sd card out, which would also lead to the messages we (the afflicted) have been getting.

If they are NOT on an external powered hub or external powered supply, then that would indicate there is something about your machine which is different than others afflicted - other than being M1 of course.

By far most of the cases with issues I have followed have been with intel macbooks, but I do recall - without checking if it was this thread or others - that *some* apple silicon macbooks and imacs were also affected. But, that could be a similar result from a different root cause, naturally.

Secondly, since you don't appear to have issues with drives/volumes being autonomously-force-ejected, could you run an experiment?

If they are not mission-critical during the sleeping hours, could you un-mount the drives, but not remove the usb cables or power, before going to bed, and see if any/all have magically mounted themselves in the morning. You might need to pause time machine backups during this test, as that might mount an unmounted-yet-connected drive.

If all your drives ARE externally powered, try the above test one or two nights, and then, if there are any smaller drives that can draw power from the M1's usb port only, run the test with them, and see if *they* mount autonomously, without your intervention.

I cannot recall if your macbook has an sd card slot, but if it does, could you also leave one in (without any data on it that you cannot afford to lose to drive corruption of course) of a couple of days, first mounted, and then unmounted, to see what happens?

Though my internal SD card doesn't always force-unmount, it will almost always mount itself from an unmounted state over a period of 12 hours or so.

Better would be if you have an intel macbook also running os12 to perform the test, but even with the laptops I have in the house, I only have one running os12, so options are limited.

What is even more perplexing, is that if I unmount the sd card myself, I then cannot re-mount the sd card without removing it then reinserting it; when unmounted by me, it no longer appears in Disk Utility, for me to simply click 'mount'. It is this that makes me suspect that power is being cut - however briefly - to the macbooks' internal usb hub, and then reinstated. When this happens on a force-unmounted sd card, it would be the equivalent of the OS suddenly finding an sd card in the slot, and then mounting it. Or internal bus-powered usb drive, of course.

If you should undertake to test the drives, I thank you in advance.

Since it might help to get an idea of what machines are affected, those of us with problems could perhaps list machines at the bottom of the post.

Mine with this problem is a 2015 2.5ghz dual-graphics 15" macbook pro. No issues prior to OS12 (other than the display coating peeling off, of course...)

Lawrence Finch wrote:

Good questions. I’ll answer what I can. Yes, I meant volumes, not drives in one case; the other is actually a RAID drive configured as 2 separate drives.

My M1 has an OWC 14 port powered hub (which actually powers the MBP through USB-C/Thunderbolt 3). I have 1 drive (2 volumes) plugged directly into the other Thunderbolt 3 port on the MBP. the 2nd & 3rd drives (the split RAID) plugged into a USB-C port on the hub. The last drive is a hardware mirrored RAID drive pair plugged into a USB-A port (a very old WD MyBook, probably 10 years old or more) as one of the TM drives; the other TM drive is one drive of the split RAID. The OWC also has SD and micro-SD slots. I’ve used these slots with no problem, either. I use 2 volumes for alternating CCC backups (yes, I’m really big on backing up).

I don’t doubt there are configurations that have a problem and tracking it down should be Apple’s responsibility, but I’m happy to work on narrowing down the problem. But the more interesting question is what is the commonality between the Macs that DO have this issue. And are all of them configured to NOT shut down drives to save power when the Mac is idle; that is an available option.

---------------

thanks for the answers!

You are of course absolutely correct that tracking down the problem should be Apple's job, but to give them the benefit if the doubt, I can understand a bug creeping in or being affect by something new in Monterey, and not thoroughly testing older machines is perhaps an unfortunate result of getting a shiny new OS every year. That said, they have been notified of this problem, and so should have resolved it by now, or at least issued guidance to users to preclude sd card corruption because of this problem. Can you imagine a wedding photographer, for example, working on last weekend's photos only to see the whole lot disappear? Yes, I know they *should* be recoverable, if not at file-system level, then at least at bit level, but it's just a headache we simply don't need. So many of Apple's users are high-end creators, and corruption-inducing bugs like this should not be allowed to persist.

Your one drive with two volumes plugged directly into the Thunderbolt 3 port on the MBP; is that bus-powered or externally powered? If it is externally powered, then it is not likely to succumb to this problem, if my thesis holds water, but if it is a 'portable', ie macbook internal usb bus-powered drive, then it is an ideal candidate for testing.

None of the other cards or drives plugged into the hub should be affected by this issue, as they are not deriving power from the macbook, 'merely' using it to process data.

as a further update, on reboot into normal mode (ie, not safeboot) I ejected the sd card. Now, around two and a half hours later, I just checked and the sd has reappeared. Hasn't been kicked out yet, but that will come.

So, to be clear;

Booting into safe mode STILL lets the OS 'randomly' mount an unmounted sd card on its own volition, with no user input.

Clearing caches etc, effected by the safeboot furthermore has no effect (but then, why should it, as the same behaviour was observed in SB mode anyway, indicating it is NOT a bad cache/errant extension/dodgy user daemon etc)

The mounting/unmounting of the sd card is not reported in the system log, which is in of itself a little odd, but hey ho.

My suspicion is that something (bug) is 'randomly' interrupting power to the sd card usb interface, though some other users here have reported this same eject/mount activity with external usb devices too, so it maybe the whole usb line being taken down. This interruption is then compensated for by the OS, causing it to mount a usb device, whether that be external or sd card connection point, as it would appear to the os that the device has just been plugged in.

This interruption would explain both the force-ejecting-by-the-os AND the os-mounting-when-not-wanted, as the last one should certainly not happen other than on reboot (force relaunching the finder, for example, does not mount the card)

If anyone has a better explanation and solution, then as prince charles might say, 'I'm all ears'

In my judgment the issue rests solely at the feet of Monterey. My Time Machine worked perfectly, never a glitch of any sort, until I updated to Monterey. Now every time I wake my iMac I get the Disk Not Ejected Properly alert. The cable is sound (never any issues before Monterey); TM always worked seamlessly; there's nothing wrong with the TM drives that Disk Utility could identify. All back to Monterey!

Any of that might be correct. But there's no downside to blowing out your ssd port and wiping the card contacts with a little alcohol. Just sayin'…

Lawrence, the problem is so widespread (and coincides exactly with Monterey's release) that probability demands a hard look at the OS.

While my major problem with my external Time Machine drive — only one drive was afflicted, and it would not show up in Finder or Disk Utility — was resolved with a previous Monterey update, there are residual performance issues, including sluggish response times and (this is weird) the displacement of all my Desktop files and folders to the extreme right of my screen after entering and then exiting Time Machine.

It's not a fully functional OS, at least when it comes to accommodating external drives — all of which in my case were purchased from the Apple Store.