KJH1986 Author

Level 1

43 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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3 replies

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thiagomeedeiros

Level 1

18 points

Oct 29, 2022 10:23 PM in response to KJH1986

Same thing happening to me. Disk not properly ejected message on my External SSD!

Always after sleep mode. In the new system, they removed the option of energy saver, where it was possible to put the hard disk so it doesn't turn off after sleep.

Apple complicating things simple again!

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leroydouglas

Level 10

179,358 points

Oct 28, 2022 6:40 AM in response to KJH1986

KJH1986 wrote:

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.

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.

I just want to know if Apple has ever addressed this in any official capacity and if a fix is ever coming for this?

Call Customer Support (800) MY–APPLE (800–692–7753)

or on line Apple Support

Outside the USA—Contact Apple for support and service by phone

See a list of Apple phone numbers around the world.

Contact Apple for support and service - Apple Support

You can file a bug report /submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

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top10man

Level 1

9 points

Nov 10, 2022 10:28 AM in response to KJH1986

In Ventura, this option is now found in Displays / Advanced / Battery & Energy / . There is a toggle button for "prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off"

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80 replies

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

35,653 points

Dec 11, 2022 10:58 AM in response to Old Toad

Yep, that's the preferred workaround, and is effectively what the OS would need to do for option #2, above.

KJH1986 Author

Level 1

43 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.

KJH1986 Author

Level 1

43 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.

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.

Jan 10, 2023 12:10 AM in response to KJH1986

Hi just throwing my hat in as well. Having the issue since months on my MBP M1.

Did anyone find an entry in a log file that documents the moment when a drive is being ejected?

I might, but not sure, so if some of you could cross check?

For the time when the drives have been ejected, there is an entry in the wifi.log file (-> see below)

excerpt of wifi.log

The issue applies to external drives, no matter what connection type (USB or TB), with or without external power supply for the drive, connection over a dock (OWC) or directly, or daisy chained. Sometimes drives will not be mounted back. In more than one instance even my internal Data volume has been ejected.

In one case, an external disk has been ejected several time while doing a search in spotlight for a file.

Apple so far has been going though the standard routine, including deep diagnostics (nothing found) but replacing the IO Ports (USB-C), nothing changed, even under Ventura...

So far the problem only happens to be on my MBP M1, not on my other, older Macs.

I do get the issue on an erratic basis. Some days are just fine, and some... oh well... So far I could not figure out if there is something different between the turbulent days and the days when is just runs smoothly. After trying most or all of the common suggestions - looking at the wifi.log file, I might turn off WLAN on my MBP for a while and see if it happens again or not.

Jan 10, 2023 7:29 AM in response to KJH1986

Same issue here. I have spent more than 10 hours on the phone with apple to try and fix all the way upto tier 3 support. They go back to it must be all 20something drives I've tried and only and issue with the 1 computer i'm calling about. haha! Ridiculous. Same issue on 12 macs, and all sorts different drives, connection methods, os version and hardware. The mac pro's are by far the worst though.

It is not just a single eject it is an ongoing failed to eject, remounting, failed to eject and remount. This can happen a few hundred times over night. SSD's, HDD, thunderbolt, usb, firewire even. Powered drives, and usb bus powered.

What I've found so far is the same drives causing issue when connected through another powered medium wont have the issue. So my thunderbolt arrays connected via a thunderbolt display, or usb drive connected through a powered dock. A powersource between the mac and drive is required.

I've been experimenting with an app call ejectify which will force eject a drive when the display sleeps or computer sleeps. It works to eject but the mac is remounting then while sleeping and it'll fail to eject again. Disabling Powernap should prevent the remounting this but it doesn't work.

gkl7

Level 1

12 points

Jan 13, 2023 6:37 AM in response to tbirdvet

Here is what I found in Ventura, as per your request to look.

System preferences/Displays/Advanced

Under battery & Energy

There is a statement: "Prevent automatic sleeping on the power adapter when the display is off" Not sure if this has anything to do with the problem.

I have found now that I repeatedly receive the Disk Not Ejected Properly, every few minutes now for both external drives. This is most irritating. This has been happening now for two days.

Message:

"Disk Not Ejected Properly" Eject "DriveName" before disconnecting or turning it off. This message is automatic, I have tried everything I know, but so far unable to stop it.

Apple should be taking responsibility for such situations. Unforteunately customer support has in the past not been very helpful with other situations, but I will be attempting to use them again.

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.

Jan 30, 2023 11:14 AM in response to KJH1986

I'm not familiar with your hardware or your version of macOS, but I've had this problem for donkeys' years on my Pro, now running High Sierra 10.13.6. (Why such an old Pro and an old OS? Mine is the last Pro you could modify, before Apple began soldering everything in place.). I've tried all those stupid solutions you mentioned including removing the battery from the machine between troubleshooting iterations. However, just recently something occurred to me that I'm now investigating. What I have been in the habit of doing to wake the machine up is tapping on the track pad until I get a response. Sometimes this tapping, or rubbing, gets very vigorous when the machine fails to immediately awake, and when it does I often but not always get the awful, dreaded messages that my external drives, including my RAID drives have been incorrectly ejected. I've only had one catastrophic failure of an SSD in an external enclosure I use as a secondary backup device, but it and the enclosure were under warranty (the great folks at OWC,) so the drive was replaced, no questions asked. Now I am experimenting with different ways to wake the machine up, and I am avoiding the track pad completely. My theory: some gesture on the track pad is signaling the OS to eject the drives. I've never understood the track pad's gesture interface well enough to use it effectively, but that does not mean I am not inadvertantly using it in a counter intuitive way, and causing the drives to eject. So far the spacebar seems to always work and I have not had any of my disks eject since embracing this idea. Go figure... Your mileage may vary, but at least this sort of experimentation is low-key and unobtrusive.

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

35,653 points

Jan 30, 2023 11:27 AM in response to perlboy_emeritus

I'm not sure which Pro you are referring to, but I have a MacPro 5,1 and run macOS Mojave without issue.

Jan 30, 2023 11:34 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

MacBookPro9,2. Why fix it if it ain't broke? Apple is rich enough without more of my money. Try waking the machine up by random stroking and tapping the track pad, and see if it ejects your drives. This problem seems universal, given all these reports, so it has nothing to do with the age of my machine.

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

35,653 points

Jan 30, 2023 11:40 AM in response to perlboy_emeritus

Ah, you said "Pro" so I thought you meant you had a tower MacPro.

Barney-15E

Level 10

110,405 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.

Jan 30, 2023 11:52 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

Sorry, my bad. MacBookPro, the only type of Mac I've ever used, and this disk not ejected properly event has been happening for as long as I can remember.

Jan 30, 2023 11:58 AM in response to Barney-15E

Preventing sleep in this way has solved the problem for me.

I use my MBP in clamshell mode in a Brydge vertical dock with my HDD connected to that, and an external display & peripherals.

I have Settings > Battery > Low Power Mode set to "Never"
I have Settings > Displays > Advanced > Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off set to "on"
In have Settings > Desktop & Dock > Hot Corners > bottom-right set to Put display to sleep

When I want to turn off the display, I basically mouse into that bottom right corner. My settings prevent sleep, which seems to prevent my drives from being automatically disconnected. It still 'locks' the display to wake up the screen, and it still allows Time Machine to run its backups, which I like. I'm unsure whether there's any downside to not allowing Sleep.

External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura