External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

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KJH1986 Author

Level 1

69 points

External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

Just updated to Ventura on a Mac Studio and I noticed that I still have the issue of my external HD disconnecting when the computer goes to sleep. I know this because I get the “disk not ejected properly” message when I wake the computer.

I suppose my question is this, are we EVER going to get a fix to this long-standing problem? This has been a bug I have dealt with on multiple macs, multiple external drives, and every version of MacOS for at least the last decade. It seems like something Apple should be able to fix, and yet, every time I upgrade to the latest OS I have the smallest hope that this issue might have finally been resolved. Every time I am disappointed to see that it persists. I’m far from the only person with this issue, and it is not a specific machine or OS causing the issue, it is every mac I’ve ever had and every version of MacOS.

Please, DO NOT suggest an “SMC reset”, “failing HD cables”, “reinstalling MacOS” or any of the other useless recommendations that serve no purpose other than to send people on a quixotic and time-consuming quest. This is a well known, well-documented , longstanding bug. This is clearly a problem that Apple needs to address and I’m finally annoyed enough to post about it after yet another year of the latest OS failing to address it.

The Mac Studio wasn’t cheap, and part of the expectation a person has around what is supposed to be a powerful, desktop workstation would obviously be that— given its intention as a professional workstation— that it isn’t ejecting external drives just because it needs a nap. Before you ask, yes, the behavior continues even if you turn off “put hard drives to sleep when possible” in the energy saving preferences. The only solution is a third party app like Jettison or to set your energy savings so that the computer never sleeps.

I just want to know if Apple has ever addressed this in any official capacity and if a fix is ever coming for this? The fact that there’s a market for third party apps that have to exist to try and mitigate this long-standing bug should be kind of embarrassing. I don’t get it, you can create your own processors that exceeded everybody’s expectations while running cool to the touch but you can’t get harddrives to stop ejecting? That seems odd. Does Apple plan on addressing this? Have they ever said anything about this at all? If anybody knows, I’d appreciate it.

Mac Studio, macOS 13.0

Posted on Oct 27, 2022 12:35 AM

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Answer 1

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KJH1986 Author

Level 1

69 points

Oct 31, 2022 9:08 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

Currently I'm using Jettison so that my drives are safely ejected before sleep and storing my encryption keys for those drives in my keychain so that they can be automatically remounted when the computer wakes up. Not the most elegant solution but other than disabling sleep it's the only work around until this is fixed.

Given the potential for data corruption with a problem like this, it really is unacceptable that this has been an ongoing issue for so many users for as long as it has been. These are machines advertised as professional grade, for professional workflows. The idea that the OS itself may be responsible for corrupting a user's data or Time Machine backups seems like a pretty serious oversight. In the grand scheme of bugs and their respective levels of seriousness, something with this much potential for data loss persisting the way it has really feels like Apple fumbling the ball.

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Answer 2

KJH1986 Author

Level 1

69 points

Oct 30, 2022 9:43 PM in response to leroydouglas

I filed a bug report and still haven't heard anything back. Given the longstanding existence of this problem and how many users know about it already I have to assume that my filing a report about it did about as much good as screaming into the wind.

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Answer 3

KJH1986 Author

Level 1

69 points

Dec 11, 2022 7:50 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

I appreciate your input but I think you might misunderstand the issue. A few thoughts—

First thing is that, as you said, this is not the OS safely ejecting the drive to go to sleep. It is “Disk Not Ejected Properly”. This means the OS reduced power to a drive to such an extent that it couldn’t even remain connected in a hibernation state. This is likely to cause data corruption, not prevent it. If this really was a dichotomy between reduced battery life and damage to user data, I’d strongly argue that Apple chose wrong. If the options you laid out were the only choices, then Apple implementing something akin to what Jettison does to unmount/remount the drives would obviously be preferable to risking damage to the user's data.

Fortunately we don’t have to make that choice because it’s not actually true that the machine needs to eject the drives in order to sleep. It just needs to stop writing to them before suddenly entering into a low power state (sleep) in order to prevent potential data corruption. This doesn’t require the full ejection of a drive, the drive merely needs to be made inaccessible to any background processes that may try to write to the drive while it is in a low power “standby” state because the drive isn’t receiving enough constant power to write to or read from reliably and safely. It may seem like splitting hairs, but there’s a difference between software hibernating or “soft dismounting” a disk in the background and truly ejecting it, and it’s basically the difference between a solution where the driver for handling the disk is terminated by the OS and one where the OS basically just directs itself to ignore the drive, which allows that disk to enter whatever power management/hibernation pattern the drive’s internal firmware dictates whenever it is no longer being written to/read from. This is a bit of a simplification, but the advantage of the latter approach is that you can very quickly “remount” the drive because the “mounting” is, in effect, just the OS sending instructions to the drive again to bring it out of a hibernation state. When done properly, this happens so quickly that the user would not even notice anything. You wouldn’t even have to re-input the credentials for an encrypted drive because it was never truly ejected and doesn’t need to be truly re-mounted.

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Answer 4

KJH1986 Author

Level 1

69 points

Dec 11, 2022 7:54 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

All of this is to say that (as a long-time Mac user) this is how Macs used to work back in the, “Big Cat” days. I simply did not have my desktop computer ejecting all of my drives when it went to sleep. Keep in mind that the way power is managed on a laptop vs a desktop should not be the same. Desktop users often have many permanently attached peripherals and drives because they have a stationary setup dedicated to a particular workflow. Even if there was an excuse for this behavior on a MacBook that isn’t currently connected to a power supply, I’m using a Mac Studio. One of the other computers I dealt with this on was an i7 iMac. I don’t remember exactly when this started happening, but this is a problem with the MacOS software that Apple introduced at some point. I know this because my 2009 iMac’s hardware didn’t change, and it went from not having this issue to having it at some point in the OS release cycle. This problem didn’t exist back when all my drives were more power hungry spinning drives and somehow despite the power efficiency of SSDs, better Macs now can’t maintain the tiny amount of power to keep an SSD in stand-by mode? It doesn’t make sense. My guess is it has something to do with some power menagement tweaking Apple did to hit some energy efficiency metric for improved battery life and they accidentally created an annoying limitation for desktop computers that shouldn’t have it.

It’s also important to point out that this is not how other operating systems handle external drives. This is some kind of bug or misguided power efficiency tweak and it’s an Apple problem, not a general computer problem. The irony is that whatever little gain in power efficiency that decision resulted in has likely been totally negated now that so many of us are disabling sleep altogether to avoid this problem. Apple probably doesn’t care because it means they can still use the most impressive power efficiency claims in their marketing regardless of how many of their user’s now need to disable the vanilla settings in order to use their computers without risking the corruption of their external data. In attempting to strike the right balance between efficiency and capability, Apple introduced an unnecessary issue that is frankly unacceptable for the workflows of many of the pro users they market these high-performance machines to. I cannot have massive resource libraries corrupted by my computer because the drive was attached to the computer when it went to sleep. These machines are marketed to creative professionals almost more so than anybody else and Apple appears to have ignored the actual ways this group of customers use their machines.

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Answer 5

kkuja

Level 1

14 points

Mar 18, 2024 4:19 AM in response to KJH1986

The bug is still present in Sonoma. BTW, this bug broke my external SSD drive. And when I say broke, I really mean broke. Unannounced (incorrectly stopping the power output without ejecting the disk) power interruption caused by the bug caused the disc control circuitry to corrupt. Nice work apple.

Sad: "It just works" --> "it's just broken"

If apple would care about customers, it would have fixed this bug since it was introduced over ten years ago (it's already over 12 years old). This bug is practically already at teenage. Soon it will be able to apply to college.

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Answer 6

Old Toad

Level 10

208,373 points

Jul 22, 2023 10:42 AM in response to KJH1986

This is not a solution but a workaround until the solution is found: don't put the Mac Studio to sleep. Just have the screen saver go on and make sure this option is not selected:

Again, it's not a fix but a temporary workaround.

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Answer 7

itchybro

Level 1

19 points

Dec 23, 2023 4:41 PM in response to KJH1986

Welp... I landed here after a trip to the store (Gone 20 minutes) and found this reported from my OWC 8TB raid. I'm a TV/Film composer and I spent a LOT of time loading this thing.

As Otto cried in "A Fish Called Wanda": "DISSAPOINTED!!!"

Any advice or do I spend a few days RE-LOADING this thing?

Thanks for the heads up Apple.

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Answer 8

gkl7

Level 1

24 points

May 2, 2024 10:10 AM in response to KJH1986

It would appear this topic is being ignored by Apple, and any updates to this thread are very old. The Apple community may no longer be having problems like I am, or they have all just grown used to whatever work they are living with.

It would be great if someone knowledgable in Apple could solve the problem. Maybe Bill and Malinda Gates would provide a grant for a solution.

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Answer 9

Jan 9, 2023 11:10 AM in response to KJH1986

I may have found a solution.. time will tell.

I'm running a 14" MBP M1 Pro on Ventura 13.1, connected to a Bridge ProDock, connected to a Studio Display and an internal hard drive. I too am having the "disk not ejected properly" messages after waking from sleep. I thought it may initially be due to my Bridge ProDock, but I don't think that's the case—especially after finding this thread.

I went into System Preferences > Displays > Advanced and found this toggle option. I suspect this may address the issue, but I only just found it: Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off.

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Answer 10

Mar 9, 2023 2:12 PM in response to barbrab

My last re this thread was 2/17, and I thought I had a solution, but alas, two of my drive partitions on a single drive ejected about 10 days into that experiment. Simply adding a dedicated 5v dc supply to external enclosure attached to a 7-port Pluggable USB 3.0 hub with its own dc supply failed, just as all previous attempts had. However, I have one last configuration change that seems to be holding. My setup includes an HP LP2465 monitor. This monitor includes a 4-port USB 2.0 hub (1 upstream, 4 downstream) and of course, its own dedicated power supply. And worthy of note, my MBP is a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 9,2. Why is this noteworthy? That is the first model of MBP that implemented USB 3.0 ports. All MBPs prior to that were USB 2.0.

I connected the monitor's upstream port direct to the MBP and moved the sensitive drive enclosure (a USB 3.0 device backward compatible to USB 2.0, now with its own PS) to one of the downstream ports. I also moved the 7-port hub to another port on the monitor. That hub now has non-drive devices only. So far, 16 days with no ejects. That is the longest continuous period I can recall of no spurious ejects. The monitor goes to sleep as does the MBP, more than a dozen times/day, but now I refrain from powering it down. My theory now is that not all hubs are the same, regardless of assertions to compliance certification notwithstanding, and USB 2.0 to USB 3.0 is a non-trivial engineering exercise. I still believe Apple has a latent, un-diagnosed race condition in all versions of macOS at least from Mountain Lion to the present but perhaps only in its USB 3.0 implementation. Apple broke it going to 3.0 from 2.0. I never had this problem with my predecessor Apple machine (USB 2.0 only) and my LAN was just as hardware/device intensive as now. Race conditions are the most difficult bugs to track down. I doubt fewer than .001 % of SW/HW engineers have the skill to debug a race issue which would probably require a physical hardware debugger. That just ain't gonna happen from 'dear leader' Apple. Too expensive! I'd be interested in hearing from others who have the means to further explore this USB 3.0/2.0 conundrum, since Apple won't.

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Answer 11

gkl7

Level 1

24 points

Apr 16, 2024 7:40 AM in response to KJH1986

I understand how frustrating it can be when the latest OS update, in this case, macOS 14.4.1, Sonoma, leads to issues with external drives. This also applies to all previous versions of the OS. These drives are ejecting' at any time the system wishes to do so,' with the message 'Disk Not Ejected Properly.'

It has been going on for over a year or more, and it has affected all versions of MacOS that I have used.

However, when I check, the drives are still connected and accessible, and the 'Disk Not Ejected Properly' message piles up on the right side of the screen, one after another. Oh my gosh, here come more popup messages, with what all of you are familiar with added: "Eject 'Drive Name' before disconnecting or turning it off." Yet, it is still there and active.

I'm not sure how that is possible.

Previously, they were truly ejected and did cause problems, requiring the Disk Utility First Aid and sometimes a reformatting of the drive to make the Disk Utility First Aid work. I need to make sure I have a backup.

So far, the problem has only occurred on my MBP M1, not on my other, older Mac.

I am an unsatisfied user of my new MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, when I worked with Support in the past, they were not open-minded or willing to solve problems.

It appears they pass the buck to users to attempt workarounds. How lame is that?

MacBook Pro

Chip: Apple M1 Pro

Memory: 16 GB

macOS: Sonoma 14.4.1

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Answer 12

tbirdvet

Level 6

13,887 points

Oct 28, 2022 4:51 PM in response to KJH1986

This long standing bug is only fixed by not using sleep and only turning off the display function or using screen saver until Apple really fixes the issue.

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Answer 13

Barney-15E

Level 10

113,494 points

May 7, 2024 9:17 PM in response to gkl7

It would appear this topic is being ignored by Apple,

Apple doesn't pay attention to any topic here. We are just users like yourself. If you want Apple to know about your problem, contact Apple Support or use the Feedback page.

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Answer 14

Jan 13, 2023 7:33 AM in response to functionista

SOLUTION‽

Wanted to update here. Since doing this a few days ago, I have not had the issue of the external drives being ejected.

This seems to indicate that the issue is to do with Sleep. Preventing Sleep prevents drives from automatically being ejected.

While I understand this is not fixing the real issue, it’s working for me, and it might work for some of you, too.

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Answer 15

Barney-15E

Level 10

113,494 points

Jan 30, 2023 11:45 AM in response to KJH1986

First thing is that, as you said, this is not the OS safely ejecting the drive to go to sleep. It is “Disk Not Ejected Properly”. This means the OS reduced power to a drive to such an extent that it couldn’t even remain connected in a hibernation state.

I set my Mac's to never sleep the drives. When the Mac goes to sleep, the drives are not improperly ejected.

It seems more logical that the drive's are getting an, "I'm going to sleep, you should, too," but it appears they do not go to sleep. Mine certainly get enough power when the Mac sleeps, so I don't understand your logic.

macOS mounts all drives with write cache enabled. If they arbitrarily shut themselves off, then they could cause themselves problems. I can't figure out what the drive controller's are thinking when the Mac tells them it is closing down operations, but they don't seem to think so well.

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External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

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