External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

Tried this setting with 13.1, and yes, no drives were ejected. But I had a t least one incident where an external drive was not properly mounted (drive was visible on the io-port).

Now on drive eject issues - what has the setting from above to do with drive ejects? Regardless of being connected to a power adapter or not, my MBP did eject drives.

I might turn that setting off, just to see if the issue appears again. And hope it does get resolved by Turing the setting on again ;)

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.

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.

I've posted here a number of times, with both questions and potential solutions, but until now nothing I've tried has worked, until... drum role; I've finally solved mine without any changes to default macOS settings. My eject drives problem has been with me from Mountain Lion up to and including High Sierra. Here is what has worked for me and why I believe it can be replicated.

First, have y'all noticed that Apple has never, and I mean never sold an Apple-branded USB hub? They now sell several third-party hubs but attach a disclaimer that all warranty or trouble claims must be submitted to the makers of those hubs. Translation in plain English; they know they have a problem with USB and the fix in either the firmware or the OS is not worth the dime to corporate Apple, especially since they have a story they can lay on you if you have a USB problem, to wit: SMC and/or NVRAM reset.

The problem I believe is a race condition between arrival of a wake up signal and the distribution and initialization of 5v dc over USB. It appears random because it is, because it cannot be duplicated: there is no way to resolve this to properly initialize 5v dc over USB without a significant engineering investment, and since Apple does not own USB, the way they do Firewire and Thunderbolt, why bother?

My problem was having two external drive enclosures on a 7-port USB hub. The hub was connected to a direct port on the machine. When the eject problem occurred, both of these drives always ejected, not just one but both, always both (actually 4, since both drives have 2 partitions.) Meanwhile, a RAID enclosure with its own power supply also connected to USB, but on the other direct USB port on my MBP, never ejected. I discussed this problem with technical support at both the hub and enclosure manufacturers and got conflicting advice. One said never put more than one enclosure on any hub, the other said never put even one enclosure on any hub even though they sell a 5v dc adapter for their enclosure. Their message; attach their enclosure with its own 5v dc source directly to the machine. Reading between the lines; this is subtle finger pointing, certainly implying the problem is Apple's. So I ran my own experiments.

First, I moved one of those drive enclosures to an open direct Firewire port. Voilà, this drive now never ejects while the one still on the hub did, at least once every 2 or 3 days. Remember, for me macOS has only default settings and sleep, if done correctly, is welcome. This is the only fair way to test macOS since it is valuable to permit drives to sleep on a system that is always on.

Next, I added a dedicated 5v dc power adapter to the drive enclosure. The hub itself has its own dedicated supply. Result, now neither of my two external drives eject. Going into my third week without a reboot and with no spurious ejects.

Conclusion: Apple has a latent bug in the hardware/firmware/software implementation of 5v over USB. Don't expect a solution anytime soon from Apple since we know the problem is present in all versions of macOS from at least Mountain Lion to Ventura, even in non-Intel machines given the comments on this site.

perlboy_emeritus, I agree with you that Apple is not user-friendly with any other product not made by them. I have had my own story about Apple.

They are even challenged with supporting customers with Apple products.

They have some internal procedures and policies that are not even logical, like when I was locked out of a recently purchased Apple laptop being the first owner, and fully registered for Customer Care support. They were not allowed to grant me access to my computer, even with them fully aware of who I was and all the details. Even the supervisor, nope... Apple policy and procedures--wait two or more weeks. A computer system randomly decides this. I had a hard time believing that.

What I did to solve my problem is to take the two external drives over to my Linux computer and checked the hard drives, to clean things up and both work now on my Mac laptop. Plus, I no longer leave them on or attached until needed.

maybe this is the reason they removed the option to auto sleep in desktop macs, this eliminates this problem for once, but, then the planet "will suffer" from this feature as no desktop mac will auto go to sleep at night.

I've now been totally free of spurious disk ejects for 35 days, that's at least 400+ sleep/wake-up cycles. Any lingering doubt I had re Apple's latent race condition defect associated with its USB 3.0 implementation is history. They broke it and now won't fix it and are too mercenary to admit it. Blame it on the hub manufacturers and keep pushing the worthless SMC/NVRAM reset koolaid. I encourage any macOS user with an external monitor with a built-in USB hub to try attaching any external drive enclosures to it rather than ANY of the ubiquitous multi-port hubs on the market. They probably all use the same chip-set.

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

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.

SSDs also are ejecting on my new mac mini m2, but randomly. during regular use. they appear to have not actually ejected. the only thing i notice is the notification telling me they've been ejected improperly. kind of annoying...

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.

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.

Still running on 13.2.1, reluctant to move to the latest version. Ejects have become less frequent, much less. However two weeks ago, when working the main external drive got ejected, no sleep mode or being idle - quite scary and frustrating, as I was in the middle of a tethered shooting ...

Regarding the spin down and up again issue - without touching the current settings - on many days the disks will spin down after 1 or 2 minutes, just to spin up again, making the workflow very bumpy as you need to wait to often for the disks to respond (spin up) again. On some fine days (say 2 out of 10), the disks just do not spin down, and all is smooth as silk.

It is all related to HDD drives as I do not deploy SSD (except the internal drive).

The 'prevent hard drives from sleeping' toggle in the system preferences is specifically designed for mechanical drives. SSD drives do not have mechanical components and thus are not impacted by this setting.

The SSD drives plugged into the USB ports on your system will be impacted because the USB ports deactivate when the computer goes to sleep. The ports are powered down, thus resulting in the 'disk not ejected properly' errors.

I discovered this over the weekend. I came back to find about 10 disk ejected errors on my screen. This means that the hub periodically got power (probably woke up for network wake) and then went back to sleep multiple times powering down the USB ports and then ejected the drive again.

This is NOT an issue of your computer, but the type of drive being used. However, Apple should include an option to not shut down USB ports or at least let us know if there is one with continuous power. I have to upload HUGE files that take hours or days and in Ventura, there is no way to keep the computer from sleeping and it causes major issues for cloud work.

EDIT: Check under the 'advanced' tab in Displays settings and check 'Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off" and see if that works for your situation.

Is anyone else having this same problem on a Mac Mini? Running OS 13.4 I get the same disk eject error and have fewer settings options than those using MacBooks. When I wake the Mac, the external SSD shows in Finder and Time Machine shows that it has continued to run hourly. The thought that this might sometime interfere with Time Machine causes me some concern beyond the sheer irritation of a new Mac running up to date software throwing needless errors.