External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

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.

I respectfully disagree. While enabling that option 'fixes' the issue as it just doesn't prevent the computer for sleeping automatically, it doesn't really 'fix' it if one enables sleep mode manually (some of us do).

Conversely, as @Finest Planet reports, a different enclosure may very well provide a more solid 'fix'... luck permitting. It all depends on how the chipset implements the ACPI states. I've had that happen before, as I wrote in another post — this was several years ago on an Intel-based Mac (I can't recall which version of macOS), and I had to go through three different USB-SATA adapters before I found one that worked properly, incidentally by Verbatim. The others either exhibited this same behavior, or would continuously spin up and down while the iMac was sleeping.

Also, just recently, I had to return a TP-Link powered usb hub because it would hard reset when my new M2 Pro Mac Mini went to sleep. It has fancy lights on each of the ports, and no amount of fiddling with settings on the Mac would prevent all of them from brutally shutting down and then lighting up again. The same devices — especially a Toshiba 4 TB USB HDD which I always keep attached — work perfectly fine when connected to an old Anker powered hub. I put my Mac to sleep every night and never once have I woken up to an ejection warning with the Anker (and I did the same with the old iMac as well).

While Apple could probably do something better to handle this, the problem often lies in the way the sleep status is handled on the device. In theory, when the Mac goes to sleep, each device should switch to status D3Hot (sleep but powered), but many just drop to D3Cold (sleep and unpowered, i.e. unresponsive). At that point, it's as if one had tugged the drive out of the port, and the error appears. To exacerbate the problem, macOS tends to keep checking on devices, which leads to them being reconnected and disconnected multiple times over the course of a sleep session. Even when the device itself handles D3Hot properly, it's often woken up by the system — with an HDD that's easy to tell because it spins up. Some of it may also depend on which ACPI status the Mac goes into, which is not entirely clear (anything between S0ix and S3, I'd reckon.)

This has some basic info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI#Power_states, and this page by Microsoft is quite enlightening: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/kernel/device-sleeping-states. (Some of it is about Windows, but that's just because this is a manual about the the Windows kernel's internals.)

So while never going to sleep is a valid workaround at the expense of wasting power, a "proper" solution is using devices that implement sleep modes properly. It's impossible to know beforehand, though, which makes this issue very frustrating, especially as a single broken device in the chain (a hub, an adapter...) will screw everything up. It's why I haven't bitten the bullet on the Satechi stand hub — it looks great on paper and it's nice to have an NVMe SSD within it, but what if it ends up choking on sleep each night?

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

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)

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.

OK thanks, I was getting crazy.

It is supposed they are working on the issue:

If you see “disk not ejected properly” on your Mac Pro (2023) – Apple Support (UK)

But if we change the location to "en-us" the article changes?, so I am not sure.

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.

Hi,

Currently I have a homemade solution very lightweight and free:

• Install SleepWatcher: can use the official binary (link below) or recommended just install it with brew.

Link: https://www.bernhard-baehr.de/

With brew (the last one is to start the daemon with the system):

brew install sleepwatcher
brew services start sleepwatcher

As note, there is no need to grant input monitoring permissions to sleepwatcher for this.

• Create 2 scripts in the user folder that installed sleepwatcher with brew, if used the official binary, read its documentation:

.sleep

#!/bin/sh

for i in $(diskutil list external | grep external | awk '{print $1}'); do
	diskutil eject $i
done

.wakeup

#!/bin/sh

for i in $(diskutil list external | grep external | awk '{print $1}'); do
	diskutil mountDisk $i
done

Remember to set execute permission with 'chmod +x .sleep' and 'chmod +x .wakeup'.

And that's all on sleep it will eject all external drives, and on wakeup will mount them again.

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 did this (Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off) but I still have the same problem. My iMac Pro goes to sleep and when it wakes up I get this each morning. It's already trashed one Time Machine disk.

You'll had to do what many of us have resorted to: searching for the item we want in the Setting search field. Actually it's a good method as a particular item may be listed in more than one setting and the search will find all of them.

Just some food for thought.

Congratulations on the new mac, nice one.

Have you tried going to about this mac/system report/usb to see if how many usb buses you have? I dont imagine a macbook pro having all that many ports but are there any other possibilities of ports to use? If its just one, it wont do any good though. Switching ports could possibly work

The only way to avoid this happening, other than Apple just FIXING IT, is to never plug in your external drives after sleep.

The popular workaround is to not sleep the Mac but just user the screensaver and let the monitor go to black after the screensaver has run its course.

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!