External Drives in Monterey

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 did see your post, Oliver, and thanks for that. Frankly, though, after buying the Apple branded USB-C to USB-C cable (not the charger, the one with decent transfer rates) and still not being able to mount the drive, I may just set the drive aside for a while, see if they address a fix in the next Monterey iteration. If not, I’m definitely going to try your fix. Everything is still wrecking well, and transfer rates remain decent?

Oliver Jobson wrote:

See my earlier post in this thread about different cables. Would be interested to know if that solves the issue for you?

Ouch - yeah, I agree, this is a frustrating one.

It was working flawlessly last night - 4k web cam plugged into my USB-C monitor at 5gbps and fine for meetings. This morning I get up and plug in the USB-C cable (gen1) from the monitor into the MacBook Pro M1 and it's back at 480mbps. Nothing changed so I don't know why this is happening.

In fact I noticed this morning that USB was now only connecting at 480mbps if I used the USB-C port furthest away from me. If I use the other one then the hub didn't work at all - didn't register any USB, even though the monitor displayed an image fine from both ports.

I am ******.

Apple support on the phone today who recommended an SMC reset and then OS X reinstall. Had to do that on my lunch break but didn't make a difference.

Still in the same hole.

Oliver Jobson wrote:

Ouch - yeah, I agree, this is a frustrating one.

It was working flawlessly last night - 4k web cam plugged into my USB-C monitor at 5gbps and fine for meetings. This morning I get up and plug in the USB-C cable (gen1) from the monitor into the MacBook Pro M1 and it's back at 480mbps. Nothing changed so I don't know why this is happening.

In fact I noticed this morning that USB was now only connecting at 480mbps if I used the USB-C port furthest away from me. If I use the other one then the hub didn't work at all - didn't register any USB, even though the monitor displayed an image fine from both ports.

I am ******.

Apple support on the phone today who recommended an SMC reset and then OS X reinstall. Had to do that on my lunch break but didn't make a difference.

Still in the same hole.

I truly feel badly for you; that’s a lot of hoops to jump through, to no avail. Hopefully, a fix will be issued soon.

andreserb wrote:

Monterey It's freaking me out!! my SD works fine until this D4MN upgrade. programatic obsolescence???

No. Just a bug in the OS that hopefully will be addressed soon. (Aside from this gripe, I’ve found Monterey’s performance actually very good.)

Hey apple, get your stuff together regarding how to handle a SD card in your slot. Stuff has been going on for years without a fix. The OS needs to know how to handle proper ejection and re mounting of SD cards. When sleeping, the mac wakes say for notifications or other tasks, when this happens and it goes back to sleep the disk gets forcibly ejected, causing the error message. Monterey it does this far more frequently but the issue has been around for a while. Since you have your new M1 MacBook pros and brought back the precious SD card slot, fix your issues. Sick of this. Tons and tons of people have this issue, why do you think there are all these auto eject software out there, problem is that stuff has not worked on recent OS versions. There are plenty of features that people probably won't use on this new OS update how about fix a common issue. I have submitted this in Apple Feedback as stated above, I encourage everyone else to so it will show "similar" requests so that this will get a harder look.

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)

I have the same issue. Mac Pro late 2013 model. I upgraded to Monterey and now two of my USB external hard drives keep unmounting when the computer goes to sleep. Every single day I have to unplug them and plug them back in. Same computer, same drives. It's Monterey, not the drives.

Iv'e also noticed that sometimes the computer can't wake up the monitor, which is an Apple Thunderbolt display. The monitor sleeps and won't wake up. Unplugging it and plugging back in will wake the computer. It's Monterey. It seems that all the USB ports and thunderbolt ports are flakey after the upgrade.

Please Apple, you need to do much better. I feel like I'm using older version of Windows, needing to know all kinds of secret key presses and reboot techniques and VRAM and things I shouldn't need to know or do. This is not quality and it's extremely annoying.

I have the same behavior on both M1 and I7 Minis. For the former, this eventually caused several of the drives to fail. However, Apple was unable to determine the cause of the issue. They even swapped out the logic board on the M1. I had been only seeing it on Big Sur on the M1, but it wasn't fixed with Monterey. The swap happened on Monterey. I just started seeing the issue on my I7 Mini yesterday. I have done all of the usual tests for hardware, drive health (see the same, inconsistent, error messages that others see). I had reinstalled the OS on both machines on multiple occasions. Apple suggested that I keep doing that, I refuse. Their error workflow is frustrating and they clearly aren't looking at the case notes on any of this. I have nothing constructive to add as far as a solution, just that it seems to be a common problem.

Still happening, though less frequently now with the sysprefs setting turned off, in 12.1. Really shoddy quality control by apple. Also now occurring are complete system freezes, without the panic screen of old (just had another, prompting me to write). Pathetic, really, from the richest company on earth. Can you tell I'm a little miffed?

As for sending 'feedback', it's obvious from the poster above how much notice they take of that

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.

My experience is the same as described by Perryb, working with a card in the SD slot. This was not a problem until I switched to Monterey.

I’m going to try disabling the post-sleep authentication requirement as a workaround. But leaving that disabled is not a satisfactory long-term condition for me.

I am not sure whether I would bother, mate. Seemed to be better in 12.0x with it turned off, but it's back in 12.1, though not regularly. Sometimes I'll get 5 notifications a day, many days nothing.

With the new hyper-restricted kernel and system, Apple cannot blame extensions for this cr@p, it's just poor quality control.

My suspicion is something is still powering down the usb channel that the sd card uses, or the kext is being unloaded by the system, but the log files aren't giving me any clues as to what, at this moment.

Merry crimbo, one and all, and fingers crossed santa gives us a (new year's) resolution to this issue in -very- early 2022!

I have same issue. External drives taking ages to be recognized since installing Monterey a few days ago on mid 2019 MacBook Pro. Data is everything without it we can not work. Apple please fix this.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year community.

I always hate it when I'm on a support forum, and someone says "X company doesn't read all these posts so you should go here.... ". Adobe does the same thing, although they're getting better. But this sounds like an Apple problem. If Apple creates help forums where people can help each other, but they don't do read the forums, then that's an Apple problem. Honestly I'm not sure they read all the macOS Feedback either.