External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

Here’s the thing:

When the machine goes to sleep; external drives will be ejected.

So there are two approaches macOS could take:

1) Have the OS eject all externals before going to sleep. This is perhaps the safest approach rather than complain that the drives were improperly ejected, but the OS would need to try and auto mount the drives again upon awakening.

2) Don’t sleep the machine if there are external drives mounted. This is perhaps the more obvious thing to do, but it’s inevitable people would complain their devices aren’t sleeping when idle.

It’s unclear which approach is better, though I can certainly see people complaining that their laptops won’t sleep because they forgot they had a USB key mounted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

BTW: Just to be clear on something: the problem often manifests itself (becomes apparent to you) when the machine is awakened from sleep, so it is logical to think it is sleep-related, but on occasion over the years I've had disks eject when the machine is awake and I'm actively using it. I've never drawn any conclusive connection between what I was doing at the time and the ejection, since I could never repeat the problem, but now I am very suspicious of that track pad interface, perhaps even some esoteric keystroke combination, particulary because none of the highly technical solutions offered by Apple or the community have solved the problem. Apparently random software problems, which are never really random, are the hardest to troubleshoot unless they can be duplicated.

My Mac sleeps, I just have it set to not put drives to sleep.

It is connected to a TV as a monitor which has its own sleep function. When the Mac goes to sleep, the display turns off after about five minutes of no signal.

I primary have it set not to sleep the drives because I don’t want to wait for every drive to spin up Whalen I open or save a file.

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.

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.

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.

Spoiler alert: alas, my theory that track-pad events were causing ejects is not valid. This A.M. 4 of my 7 external drives, one an SSD, the other a mechanical, were ejected when I awakened the machine. So, back to the drawing board. Does anyone know the exact log file that High Sierra writes when such events occur? Since only 4 drives were ejected I intend to focus on their enclosures (USB bus powered) and initiate a new dialogue with vendor (Other World Computing). Interestingly, both drives participated last night in uneventful backup events, which means CCC woke the machine, then woke the drives (each drive has two partitions, thus 4 logicals), performed the backups and then, after backups finished, the machine returned to sleep. I smell a big Apple rat, er bug, or some timing issue with the enclosures' power management circuit in conflict with an OS wake up signal. Logically, any cached data should have flushed before backup, so probably no loss of data. Nothing more tragic than powering off a sleeping drive, but still very annoying.

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.