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!

Have been pulling my hair out with this. I bought new cables for my MacBook Pro M1. The only thing that works is using USB-FI certified USB 3.1 gen1 or USB 3.0 gen1 cables.

Even the dell gen2 cable that came with my USB monitor only worked at usb 2.0 speeds, but replaced with a gen1 cable and it is connecting at 5gbps.

Now my display, dock and all devices are connecting properly.

I posted this on a reddit thread, hopefully it helps someone here:

stumbled across this thread a few days ago whilst trying to resolve the issue, and was at least comforted to know I wasn't the only one suffering the problem.

Did some more research and found some sites advocating stopping and then restarting kexts to mount the sd card without pulling out the flush adapter and then inserting it, but no joy.

Then, this morning, when it happened again, for some reason I thought of a problem and solution I had on my old 17" 2012 'book a few years back, with the pcie card, and 'hot swapping' the usb3 drives it allowed to utilise. Long story short, you couldn't in theory hot swap, as when one usb3 drive was removed, the os/hardware would power down the card, and not recognise the next inserted usb HD without a restart...*unless you put the computer to sleep*. Putting it to sleep, and then waking was as effective as a reboot for supplying power to, and recognising, the port. tried that with the issue we all have of the invisible-yet-inserted sd card, and waddyaknow, it works! Remounts every time!

Now, it doesn't solve the whole random unmounting problem, but at least it will remount...Until it unmounts again :Ö

hope this helps someone, and I hope apple fixes this. Sadly, it seems we all have the same model, and the same flush adapter, so I suspect it's an uncommon issue, which means I don't hold hope that apple will sort it. Might be heading back to a lower OS in that case *sad face*

Cheers all

Edit 211130;

So, I was thinking what else could possibly be doing this on sleep/after a period of time, and having already looked at and tweaked the sleep settings, but with no joy, thought of what else could be being invoked that might be related.

Look at your 'Security:General' preference pane. If you have "Require password....after sleep or screen saver begins" set with something, uncheck it. I did this a couple of days ago, and the card hasn't dismounted since. To be clear, the display is going to sleep (so it would appear *that* is not the culprit), but no security is being invoked.

This of course means you macbook is less secure, but (for now) the data on the card is less in danger of being corrupted.

cheers!

(I'll come back here if it force-unmounts again to save you all the grief)

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.

So, I ran disk first aid and rebuilt the disk directory and it seems to have fixed the problem, thanks for the tip!

^^This. And the solution, bizarre as it seems, is to swap out the USB-C cable that came with your G-Drive for an Apple USB-C to USB-C charging cable, like the ones you find in Macbook Pros and newer iPads.

I just tried this with my son's cable. The drive shows up in the Finder and in Disk Utility. This, after I was assured by Apple Suppoprt that it was a drive failure that was coincidental to the Monterey install. Right.

Are you using USB-FI certified cables? I had all sorts of issues with hubs, devices and drives in Monterey and have resolved most of them by replacing a number of my USB 3.0 and 3.1 (gen 1 and gen 2) cables with ones that are USB-FI certified.

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+.)

---------

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.

Hello iROCK! Thank you for participating in the Apple Support Communities.

We understand that your disks are unmounting and mounting again. We'd like to look into this with you to see how we can help.

If you run First Aid on the disks, does First Aid point out any errors? Does running First Aid resolve the issue? Learn how to do that here: Repair a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

If the issue persists, does changing the cables that connects your drives to your Mac help? Are you connecting directly to your Mac or through a hub?

Make it a great day!