External Drives in Monterey

"This has been discussed in the private level 6+ forum (“the Lounge” if you see other references to it), and it seems to be a problem with some SD card slots. I have an external OWC 14 port hub with an SD slot, and I just confirmed that it worked with Monterey, so it is only some slots."

Those in the private club should read this thread and understand we are talking about (and kindly refer to the first post in the thread) the internal sd card reader.

The reason why *these* slots are important are clearly too obvious to mention - personally I couldn't give a monkey's if some external connected hub with an SD slot lost its connection on occasion, but again refer to the thread for information on why the *internal* slot autonomously-force-ejecting an sd card might be an issue. To very many.

Kindly refrain from corrupting this thread further by bringing external readers/hubs into the mix. Thanks

I'll copy and paste below for your benefit:

"I'm seeing rumblings that I'm not the only one here...mid-2015 MBP and upgraded to Monterey and immediately after upgrade my external USB drive (Time Machine) and SD card (in the lost) periodically unmount themselves, give a warning and then randomly remount. This makes these external storages unusable- Time Machine won't even engage in the updated, current state."

NOT referring to external readers/hubs.

Hope that clears it up

Kindly read the subject of this thread before telling people to stick to the subject. Discussions of the internal slot are “corrupting the subject”, which is specifically about external drives.

You have an important issue to discuss, but, as it isn’t about external drives, you would be better off creating your own post with a new subject.

"Kindly read the subject of this thread before telling people to stick to the subject. Discussions of the internal slot are “corrupting the subject”, which is specifically about external drives."

Kindly re-read what I wrote, re-read the opening post, and immediate follow-ups, and continue to not pollute the thread with comments which are not about external drives (NOT hubs) and internal sd card readers.

If you have anything positive to add on these two issues, it would be welcome

If you wish to start a thread about external card readers or hubs, kindly start a new thread

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!

Perhaps, but on my M1 MBP with Monterey 12.2.1 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. Check your settings very carefully.

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.

Can't imagine what 'settings' I might need to check. Nothing from before Monterey. But happy to follow any suggestions. As Maggot indicates, TM is the only external drive that's affected for me. And TM continues to make backups for me; just that annoying notification about not ejecting properly.

" 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...)

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.

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+.)

Our experience with card and slots on any of our three iMacs is ... well, we ditched using them. We use inexpensive SSDs (PNY by brand) as transfer media. External HDDs and SSDs for backups and long term storage.

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.

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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.

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.)