USB external HDD "Disk Not Ejected Properly" while sleeping only with TB HUB connected

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ogawa9 Author

Level 1

27 points

USB external HDD "Disk Not Ejected Properly" while sleeping only with TB HUB connected

When waking my Mac's, almost always there is such Finder warning dialog:

"Disk Not Ejected Properly"

for almost all of USB external drives, sometimes for "Time Machine Backups"

but this symptom only happens when these peripherals are connected to TB terminal:

*OWC Thunderbolt HUB

*OWC Thunderbolt dock (not Thunderbolt 3 dock, but that doesn't mean I confirm TB 3 dock is OK)

*CalDigit ELEMENT HUB

Note, the drives unexpectedly forced to eject is "NOT" only connected to those hub, but also directly connected to Mac TB jacks, too. So all my drives are unexpectedly ejected.

but when I wake my mac's, basically those drives are mounted. but sometimes has trouble, so basically I always reboot (that means macOS sleep feature is useless.)

My Mac's

A: MacBook Air M1 2020

OWC Thunderbolt HUB

USB HDD is connected to OWC's USB jack

LINKUP 10GbE box, connected to OWC or directly connected to Mac (both cases, it happens)

Big Sur, now Monterey 12.1 too

B: Mac mini M1 2020

OWC Thunderbolt dock or CalDigit ELEMENT HUB

one USB HDD is connected to Mac mini USB A jack

one USB SSD is connected to TB HUB/dock TB jack (as USB-C USB protocol)

Monterey 12.1

both Mac's are "NOT" installed "OWC dock ejector" or the corresponding one from CalDigit.

A is installed almost nothing, because it is dedicated to the automatic scheduled audio recording with Audio Hijack. A only does Audio Hijack (and smb for resulting files to copy by me on Mac "B")

B was bought and newly set-up this month from scratch (not by restore from Time Machine),

Audio Hijack is not installed (I avoid it intensionally)

and has the same symptom from the very early date (= very few applications are installed.)

so, about two cases, I hardly imagine I installed something bad, because there seems to have any same software installed on two Mac's.

When Mac waking, these HUB work fine. No "unexpected eject" has been happened. Only during sleep or just at waking-up.

Mac mini 2018 or later

Posted on Dec 31, 2021 1:36 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

tbirdvet

Level 6

14,471 points

Dec 31, 2021 5:24 PM in response to ogawa9

I have a Mac Mini M1. I have a Kensington TB dock and a USB 3.2 hub connected. To the TB dock is a TB3 drive (WD Black) and an NVME 3.2 USB drive (WD blue) and both are rock solid. At first the USB drive would occasionally eject but after updating to 12.1 and swapping out the USB-C cable no issues even waking from sleep.

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Answer 2

ogawa9 Author

Level 1

27 points

Jan 12, 2022 9:17 PM in response to ogawa9

I found this:

USB hub failing under Monterey | Apple Developer Forums

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/683409?page=8

That is similar to our issue.

and "DriverKit ( .dext)" also might be related.

After replacing USB cables for HDDs', still the issue happens.

Cables are amazon Basic:

*USB std A - micro-B (USB 3.0) 0.9m

*USB std A - USB-C (USB 3.1 Gen. 2) 0.9m

One HDD is WD My Book Duo (2021EX) I bought in Nov. 2021, so hard to imagine the cable is old. (but I replaced as shown above.)

SSD is SanDisk Extreme Portable 500GB, USB-C - USB-C stock cable connection, bought May 2021.

Adding to that, I removed all TB HUB from my two M1 mac's, but still "not properly ejected" issue happens.

(and some other anomaly issues sometimes happen after waking)

For "not properly..." message when Time Machine,

It happens for me too, but my Time Machine is NAS. Synology DS1618+, smb via 10GbE. Of course, it worked fine with my prev. Intel iMac (until replaced with this Mac mini M1)

In this case, it happens when mac looks waking normally.

So my guess is that no physical USB drives are not "ejected" luckily, but some disk mounted like NAS or Time Machine snapshot of APFS might be "ejected".

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Answer 3

Benzo42

Level 1

12 points

Jan 11, 2022 12:36 PM in response to ogawa9

I have the same problem with a message that disks are being ejected in error prior to disconnection. The disks remain connected despite the error message -- which is what is expected.

These messages appear, periodically through the day, once or twice, without waking from sleep or other rebooting. work is actively proceeding and then an error message.

The drive is being used for Time Machine backup. It is possible that the false ejection is related to completion of a backup.

We are using Mac OS 12.0.1 (Monterey) on an iMac M1. The external drive is a Seagate One Touch, 4Tb drive, split into two volumes. Both are claimed to have been ejected incorrectly, though nothing has been done expressly to the cables or to the on screen icons to request ejection.

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Answer 4

tbirdvet

Level 6

14,471 points

Jan 11, 2022 4:56 PM in response to Benzo42

After not having any issues for several weeks my TM drive connected to a usb port had the disk not ejected properly issue. I then tried two other drives (SSD and mechanical) and cable and it happened once again. I moved my drive (SSD) to another location and changed the cable once again and it has been OK for the last 3 days. I also believe it may happen when TM starts a backup for some reason. As a side note I have a TB drive also connected to my Mini M1 and that has never been ejected.

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USB external HDD "Disk Not Ejected Properly" while sleeping only with TB HUB connected

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