External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

You don't state the external connection but I assume it is USB. My research suggested an Apple problem with its implementation of USB 3.0 and I posited that USB 2.0 hubs were immune to the problem, but alas, even after many days of zero "improper ejects", and many dozens, perhaps hundreds of sleep/wake events, I still get an occasional improper eject event (like once every 3 weeks or so) even with an older USB 2.0 hub. Apple just does not give good USB. As Apple will not own up to the problem, and obviously can't or won't debug a race condition, we are stuck and just have to live with the problem. Me, my next laptop will not be a Mac. I'm leaning towards a Framework modular running Ubuntu. It's a lot of work moving off the Apple platform but when my current machine dies I'll switch. Another annoying macOS problem (I run High Sierra) just happened, and it happens every 2 weeks or so, and only a reboot fixes it. My integrated monitor goes black even while my remote monitor is alive and well, and nothing I've tried will wake it up. I am typing this into a window on my external HP, and when done, and I post this I'll reboot. Man does all this suck.

My M1 mini sleeps all the time. I’ve got a couple Thunderbay disk arrays, and several USB-3 spinning, hard drives connected, and I never have a problem. I don’t allow my drives to sleep, but that’s primarily because I don’t want to wait for them to spin up when I go to open or save a file.

pmset disksleep 0

What have done your years in Mac OS X and Mac OS was make a folder naming it Networked Drives and dag to right side of the dock! After sleep if it doesn't reconnect a mounted drive I just click to icon in right side folder to auto connect back to share I made and alias

1

This is not a solution but a workaround until the solution is found: don't put the Mac Studio to sleep. Just have the screen saver go on and make sure this option is not selected:

Again, it's not a fix but a temporary workaround.

You are problem! The problem old style hard drive had to 'Sleep' the years Windows administration have years have said "Macs are to chatty on the network" and so in Mac OS Time stopped Bonjour! So what is happening is the hard drive doesn't get a ping to wake up from Mac OS anymore! So reboot to clear your cache and try it again to see if you get the error on SMB sense MAX OS Venture use SMB 3 now while windows only products sleep all the time and is waiting for Windows machine to wakie it up (be chatty')! :)

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

adding to the discussion of the usb bugs on ventura:

same here, started in Mojave (or maybe before that), worse after ventura upgrade and still worse/happening after most recent ventura upgrades (now at 13.5.2 (22G91)) and it continues and happens frequently as drives go missing while it is awake as well.

well known/documented bug for many years in Mac OS, I don't understand why it's not only persisted but gotten worse.

iMac 2020 5K intel

I am having a similar problem and also may have some insight and a potential course of action. I have a Mac mini with attached storage and mount the attached HDDs using SMB on my iMac. If I step away for some time and come back only one of the mounted shares remains mounted - out of 6 shares. The one that remains mounted has my Photos.app library and Music.app library on it. The others are just bulk storage.

I am assuming that it remains only because there is an active link to the data on it and the others are unceremoniously unmounted because there is no activity on those shares.

The question is how do I cue macOS to maintain an active link all of the mounted shares? OR make those permanent. Maybe there is a autofs setting?

Or maybe the answer is here

Sounds like a MacOS SMB configuration setting, as you suggest.

In a terminal, tryCode:

sysctl -a | grep net.smb

My guess is it's one of those _deadtimer parameters. Try setting them to zero, one at a time, to see if you can find teh one that matters. To change these:Code:

sudo sysctl net.smb.fs.kern_deadtimer=0

etc.

Make a note of their current value before changing; you can just reset these to their previous values the same way if required.

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?

leroydouglas

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

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neither of which has done or will do any good based on long time experience. like the OP, the bug persists through numerous OS versions and updates.

Here's one other clue to what may be the cause of this currently unresolved disk eject mystery.

I recently bought a MacStudio running Sonoma 14.3.1 and added two identical 2TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD drives in identical housings (Orico). One was formatted for strictly Mac work, using APFS format. The second was formatted using ExFAT for use on both Mac and PC's. Both are on their own Thunderbolt port on the back of the system, and the hardware seems to show there are 4 Thunderbolt busses.

I generally sleep my system when I step away for more than two hours, including overnight when it will be off for 14 or more hours at a stretch.

When I wake the system (using the mouse) the APFS drive never has any disk eject messages. But the ExFAT drive always has multiple disk eject messages...the more hours it slept, the more messages. (I'll track the sleep time/eject failure messages and see how often this happens, but it seems to happen once per hour.)

Sonoma doesn't have the same power down options for the drive mentioned in most of the posts in this thread...once again, Apple got rid of those options in the newest iteration of the System Settings UI. (UGH!)

I'm going to just sleep the monitor going forward and see if that stops the apparent disk error, and in theory eliminate the risk of an improper ejection. But I wonder if there is any risk of not powering down my system, with its three SSD drives, and simply sleep the monitor instead?

Might this drive format issue be a clue to what could be happening? For those who have posted in the past, is the ExFat formatted drive perhaps a clue to what's going on??

This issue (ejecting when the Mac goes to sleep) started happening after my most recent update to Sonoma. I have an M1 Studio with an OWC 4 bay drive that dismounted after I left it overnight. I was downloading photos from cards. I had four other drives attached - a lexar card reader, the SD reader in the Mac, a 4 TB SSD that I keep attached all the time, an external HDD where I save my duplicate images, and an ancient GRAID. All are attached to the Mac. The only drive that gets dismounted is my OWC HDD array, it wasn't happening before I upgraded to Sonoma. I am trying this solution tonight - "prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off," hopefully it will work. I agree that I should just dismount it and turn it off when I'm done with downloads, but sometimes I need to keep it on and be able to walk away.

The bug is still present in Sonoma. BTW, this bug broke my external SSD drive. And when I say broke, I really mean broke. Unannounced (incorrectly stopping the power output without ejecting the disk) power interruption caused by the bug caused the disc control circuitry to corrupt. Nice work apple.

Sad: "It just works" --> "it's just broken"

If apple would care about customers, it would have fixed this bug since it was introduced over ten years ago (it's already over 12 years old). This bug is practically already at teenage. Soon it will be able to apply to college.

I have noticed an interesting feature of the bug for me.

I use the same MacBook Pro at home and at work. At work I plug into an external monitor, and the macbook sleeps a lot, but I never get the bug on waking. At home I do not use an external monitor and I can get 10+ notifications for 'disk not ejected properly' in a short sleep session.

So the external monitor must be keeping the power on for the external HDD as well?

I wonder if this is an odd mix of Macs being a little odd in their implementation of the USB stack, and USB chipsets devices not always behaving correctly.

Years ago I went through three different USB SATA enclosures due to sleep issues on the iMac I had at the time. With one, the disk spun down and then spun up again, about once a minute. The second one didn't even spin down, but woke the Mac back up immediately. The third one worked as expected.

Now I'm having a similar issue as many others here: I upgraded from an Intel-based iMac to a M2 Pro Mac Mini. I had an ungodly tangle of USB hubs on the iMac, in part due to logistics (couldn't keep everything on the same desk!) and took the opportunity to tidy up a little bit. I keep 3 external disks always connected: the TM backup, a 4 TB "repository" HDD, and a cheap 500 GB SSD in a SATA enclosure. I also have another 1 TB HDD in another enclosure that occasionally plug in when I needed it.

On the iMac, and on the Mac Mini until a few days ago, those were connected to two separate Anker USB hubs, each with its own power supply. I used two of them because the hubs didn't do well with more than two disks each. I was always a little tentative when plugging other things in, as it would occasionally disconnect the disks, but it was generally fine. When the Mac slept, the disks would also spin down, and then occasionally wake up through the night as the Mac did its own PowerNap thing. No messages whatsoever, and everything open from those disks would remain open and functional.

A few days ago one of those hubs just stopped working. The hub itself does work, but it doesn't "see" the external power anymore. I decided it was a sign from the universe and bought a 7-port powered hub, making sure the power brick was powerful enough. I settled on a TP-Link UH700, which I figured would be better than the random no-name things on Amazon, and for the most part it was. I can connect all four disks to it and they all just work, and I even have three higher-power ports to spare for charging something, if I wanted to.

The problem is that bringing the Mac to sleep just cuts the power off, and there's simply no way around it. I've tried everything, but by the time I wake the Mac up in the morning, the entire right side of my screen has turned into a column of disconnection warnings.

Interestingly, this hub has one LED per port for some reason. Once the Mac sleeps, I can actually see the disconnection take place. The SSD does out first, followed by the HDDs. Then they all come back together a few seconds later.

A more recent Crucial USB SSD, connected to the Mac via USB-C rather than USB-A, doesn't seem to care. Plugging the hub into a USB-C port via a simple adapter won't make any difference, however, so it's not about the physical port.

No amount of tinkering in SysPrefs's Energy pane will fix it on my end. When the Mac tells the hub "we've gone to sleep", the hub should say "ok kids, spin yourselves down" but for some reason it just goes nuclear on them. Even a single thumb drive will exhibit the same behavior, so it's not a matter of using too much current.

Considering that the other hubs worked, I am inclined to blame the hub more than Apple, though it's probably a case of both being at fault somewhere. I do wonder if 7-port hubs are inherently worse at this, because they're generally implemented as two 4-port hubs, one connected to the other (hence why 7 available ports instead of 8).

I think I'm sending it back and trying another hub, since Anker doesn't seem to manufacture the same kind I had before; or rather, they do, but not with a micro-usb power port anymore. It's frustrating because I often just leave things as they are when I put it to sleep, and not all I use will be restored upon reboot if I shut down the Mac down. Further, ejecting the disks to have a "safer" sleep isn't always convenient as I may just have things open from those disks. Leaving the Mac fully on for prolonged periods when I'm not here just doesn't sit right with me.

You'd think in 2024 these issues would be a thing of the past, yet here we are...

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.