External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

I'm curious: did you buy a Magic Track-pad with your Studio? I've written several posts to your thread re my experience with waking my MBP by touching and swiping its track-pad. I am now convinced that my erratic and unfocused banging away on the track-pad is what was causing my external drives to be ejected. I'm not a track-pad gestures expert {not IMHO one of Apple's better implementations, almost as stupid as thumb-typing) so I rely on a mouse, but that pad is so conveniently located that I had been, until a week ago, using it to wake up a sleeping Mac (not a sleeping bee, but close :-) .). I now use the space-bar, one press and like magic, macOS awakes and all my seven drives are still mounted. I have tried all the many technical solutions advanced by Apple or the Apple community, and none, and I mean absolutely none worked. Also, a very long telephone session with Apple support in which one of their minions walked me through exactly the same steps and procedures I performed by myself. I can read and follow written instructions as well as the next CS type with an MS, so I learned absolutely nothing by letting that dude lead me through the "SMC reset, etc" evolutions. And since none of those special sleep settings ever made any difference, I ignore them and set computer sleep and display sleep to 15 mins, and boxes checked to put disks and network to sleep, which I think are the defaults for 10.13.6. Interestingly, I use Carbon Copy Cloner for backup, and of course, it has to wake the machine at 2, 3 and 4 A.M. to perform all of my nightly backups, and it has never ejected a drive in error. Clearly, the CCC code knows how to wake the OS and unmount and mount drives without breaking anything. Does Apple, really, and is their track-pad code really bug free?

Please tell all of us who are very interested in this issue exactly how you wake your machine? What keys or input devices do you press or activate? Curious minds would like to know.

If using Ventura 13.1 have you tried...

System Settings > Displays > Advanced > Prevent Automatic Sleeping on Power Adapter When the Display is Off (with to 'on')?

I'm hoping that will work to stop external hard drives disconnecting.

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.

I have tried multiple Hard Drive Enclosures trying to resolve this, and I found one last Sept that seems to have stabilized this eject issue with me: https://a.co/d/5rFobHY

At the same time I also updated my drive to a Western Digital 18TB WD Purple Pro: https://a.co/d/chxrz9i So, I'm not positive which one helped the most (pretty sure it's the enclosure), but I only get random ejects every few weeks now.

I also minimized what USB accessories I plug in, ever since I discovered one of my USB hubs seemed to make the problem worse. I hope this helps!

I found this on the OWC site. I suppose it's possible I have too many things connected...

https://software.owc.com/knowledge-base/disk-eject-errors/

Ventura/Sonoma: preventing sleep is a bit more complicated

1. In System Settings, click on Lock Screen. then set Display Sleep to never when plugged in. Then under “Displays” / Advanced, check “Prevent automatic sleeping:. In Energy Saver, uncheck, “Put hard disks to sleep when possible”

Most users never see this problem. It is a flaw in the design of Thunderbolt and can be difficult to troubleshoot. 

The more devices you have connected to your computer, the more likely this issue will occur. Even a Thunderbolt monitor can trigger disk ejects in some cases. 

Note: Disk ejects like this are very rare with USB. If you have a USB enclosure that keeps ejecting, it is a cable issue, or a failing enclosure.

I found an answer that worked quite well for me. I had been plagued with this issue for years. For me, the fix was twofold... The first thing I did that started to keep my drive mounted for longer periods of time was to disconnect all my USB hubs. But it still had occasional issues. Then, I started trying different hard drive enclosures. Some worked better than others but, then I found a great one that was very stable, and inexpensive. I put it into service in September 2023 and cannot remember the last time my drive did not eject properly. This is that enclosure: https://a.co/d/2zgoNXK PS: The only thing I have checked in Energy Saver is "Prevent Mac from automatically sleeping when display is off".

We're all users here, volunteering our time to help others. Apple doesn't routinely monitor these forums.

If you like, you can submit feedback - Feedback - macOS - Apple

yes... the only solution is using Amphetamine or similar and avoiding your system go to sleep

I guess the solucion Apple put on this is removing the sleep feature from System Prefs in desktop Macs.

What worked for my iMac (Ventura) was

pmset disksleep 0
pmset sleep 0

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.

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.

So I am now on Ventura 13.3 MBP M1 Max and still having the hard drives ejecting issue randomly on both bus powered USB C 3.2 ssd's and Spinning disk Raided OWC drives on USB C 3.2. I know from my support ticket with Western Digital (Sandisk SSD's) that the M1 has only a USB C 3.1 controller, not 3.2, so when you hook any USB C 3.2 drive, you don't get the full speeds of the disk and perhaps that may be contributing to the issue. I have not had any issues with Thunderbolt drives so far. I have been formatting my drives APFS per an Apple tech that told me I should be using that instead of Mac OS Extended Journaled. Today I tried the former type of format (Mac OS Extended) today on hard drives I have not used before (Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield) and no issues at all. But I know this is a random issue so we will see. I do know once a drive has had this issue, it always will. Even on other computers.