External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

Finest Planet wrote:

PS: The only thing I have checked in Energy Saver is "Prevent Mac from automatically sleeping when display is off".

That's what solved it for you, not another enclosure. I've had that checked for over a year an haven't had a improper disk ejection in all that time.

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.

In the mean time, running the command line utility:

nohup caffeinate -m > /tmp/c.out 2>&1&

should still work.

tbirdvet wrote:

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.

A workaround is what mormaracder245 and tbirdvet suggested: not using sleep and only turning off the display function and/or using screen saver until Apple really fixes the issue.

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

after more than two weeks of trying different setups I get the following:

turned off WLAN, set disk to sleep never and no automatic sleep for display. BTW this should have been on as we set that with Apple support 2 weeks earlier.

Now the external drive (with it's own power supply) stopped to spin down, did not go to sleep for three days. MBP was not shut down.

Turned WLAN on, just to see what happens, same.

Next day, did shut down MBP, after restart, the disk starts to spin down again, but the settings are the same as before ...

That's how the MBP has been operated now, including battery powered, connecting other drives. Drives spin down.

But - so far not a single drive eject.

We have an excellent lab experiment going on. You guys do all this crazy **** that we should not have to do - after all, isn't macOS the best UNIX ever written :-) - and I'll just keep waking my MBP by one touch to the space bar. So far, it's been a week since I embraced this idea and no more unplanned ejects. My machine is pure vanilla, except max memory and an internal SSD: I use it as a workstation so devices are always connected. I almost never move it, for any reason. Wi-Fi always available but this machine is also wired to router. Large HP monitor, USB multiport, RAID, two external OWC enclosures (I can boot from two alternate drives if my internal SSD were to fail,) no special sleep settings, lots of application SW including tons of my and client Perl stuff, VirtualBox (FAT drives for Doze), seven external drives, no Time Machine (I use Carbon Copy Cloner for multiple nightly backups - CCC's cron settings awakens a sleeping macOS and never, never ejects any drives, but a CCC job will fail if a drive is not or cannot be mounted.) Hopefully we will learn something existential about macOS and Apple will take a look at their, perhaps buggy, track pad code.

Very curious indeed! I asked about whether you have a Magic Track-pad because I believe the device driver code for all such devices, whether separate stand alone devices or built in to a MBP is the same. Good engineering suggests one device driver and one implementation regardless of how the HW is assembled. If I am right about this, and if Apple has a latent bug, or bugs, in that driver it would manifest itself across all Apple HW platforms that support a track-pad. I know what clamshell mode is but I never use it except on two or three occasions when my MBP awoke, its own local screen was black while the external monitor was active. It was quite a hassle to get logged in using only the external monitor (my machine is PW protected even at home and the login dialogue appears only on the local) without simply powering off the machine, a no-no. I tried all manner of poking and prodding including closing the lid and reopening it to make the internal screen active. Finally, I got logged in to the dingus using only what could be seen on the external monitor and was able to power off normally. Rebooting always corrected the problem and both screens were again active. I say this only to illustrate my very rare use of clamshell mode, and other latent Apple bugs :-(.

Yes, I too have had directly connected drives ejected.

During your testing please observe and note the following:

1: after a single press of the spacebar, do the LEDs on your USB hubs immediately light?

2: when, exactly do you see the eject messages; before you enter your password or only after login?

3: are all external drives ejected or only a few?

4: do you employ an uninterruptible power supply? If yes, does it power your hubs?

I had almost given up on finding a solution to this problem, and was resolved to just live with it, because my backup strategy is so effective, and drives are relatively cheap, certainly cheaper than a new machine, until the epiphany I had when I connected the dots, at least on my implementation, that how I was waking the machine might be the problem. That's when I returned to the Apple community to possibly revisit the issue and discovered your post. I know a week of testing does not seem like much time with which to draw a conclusion, but in a week's time I wake the machine up at least a hundred, or more times. I will confess failure if my single spacebar press causes even one drive to eject improperly. Alas, I can't look to Apple for support. My machine and my version of the OS are no longer supported. I don't believe in replacing something that works just because it's old (I'm old!) particularly since a circa 2012 MBP is a superb machine and High Sierra is a brilliant version of macOS, before it was corrupted with a lot of iOS code.

BTW: according to Systems Software Overview, my machine has been up and running for 62 days without a reboot, and now no improperly ejected drives for a full week. It runs so well I forget to reboot. Also, I've given up on ever seeing a solution to this problem from Apple. As bad as that indictment is, the competition is worse.

Juergen Baumann wrote:

oh well, back to square one......Did update to Ventura 13.2.1 - and guess what

Disc eject is back...

The only other change was to update Adobe software Lightroom, Lightroom classic and ACR to the latest versions.

No settings change, all look the same a s before.

Well, the obvious workaround is do not sleep the Mac. Just use the screensaver.

this is quite interesting as my MBP is also the 10,1 and was my first Mac with this problem, my older unibody 2007 MBP didnt.

But as the external drives werent the same either, (older USB2 vs new drive USB3) I couldn't related the problem to USB3-Mac relationship.

Wondering if this is the real problem, It could be very sad as it's being 11 years without fix.

I have 3 USB 2.0 dock for 3,5" and many external drives, HDD, SSD and NVMe, different brands, and just some drives are suffering this ejection.No matter the Mac port,cable or model, some just are ejecting and some just wont

8 3,5" 3 of them suffer this problem

2 SSD 2,5" none suffer this problem

1 Samsung Evo Pro with suffer this problem (2 enclosure tested and one dont suffer this problem with another NVMe drive tested)

this is driving me nuts

The option to prevent hard-drive sleep in Ventura seems to disappear when there are no spinning drives (ie only SSDs) attached. When it does appear, it's under Battery > Options. Regardless, the underlying system setting can be seen and controlled from the command line with pmset(1); man pmset for details.

Nevertheless, with pmset showing disksleep set to 0, I'm still seeing my external SSD being "improperly ejected" during a Time Machine backup. Frustrating.