External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

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).

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.

Would you elaborate on where to add "pmset disksleep 0". It's odd that Ventura shows my external USB-C drive shows ejected, but Time Machine is showing no errors. Igt seems as if Ventura thinks the drive was ejected, but the SSD doesn't care...if that makes sense. I added amphetamine, but ti cannot access the Time Machine partition. It can access my media partition on the same drive so we will see if it helps.

I also am somewhat distressed to see Apple allowing this annoying glitch of our equipment to persist, particularly when our Time Machine's external drive seems to have an ever decreasing lifetime even under more stable conditions.

Another annoyance introduced by my switch from Catalina, to improved security with Ventura, has been that in order to share screen now with Apple helpers the customary invites (to Accept and Agree) are gone, and replaced with a pop-up statement that Apple is happy to share your screen. O good! you think? Then the notification disappears and you wonder why ... so you click around a bit, then it appears and disappears again. What's this false offer? It turns out there's an invisible Option notice which will appear if you know how to request it - by hovering the mouse over some imaginary magic spot - and then finally you can click on the eventually visible Accept or Decline etc. Oh what a helpful skip that feels more like a glitchy delay. I'm very grateful for the effort to be even more helpful, but sorry to say I find the new detour confusing and the original track much simpler and more straight-forward.

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.

This option was moved to, of all places, the Display settings panel under 'Advanced' at the bottom where it . It makes absolutely no sense for it to be there, you would think that it would be with related settings under 'Energy Saver' which has one setting related to actual power savings and a couple sorta related. There is so little logic involved with the location of the individual settings I find myself googling every time I need to find one. I wish Apple would stop making users play "Whack-a-Mole" trying to find the randomly located settings. And I totally agree with the assessment that the new Settings app is a UI nightmare. Sad what things have come to.

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.

This just stopped happening when I went to catalina. Which to me, seems to prove there is something in OS that is different that those on the ventura/mojave sides we or at least machine I use does not know. I have not gone to ventura. Used to use an app I made to eject on sleep. Every time I try to use High sierra or mojave, the thing comes back. Tried to employ the app and, (Probably has to do with the sleep settings) the machine will wake up during the sleep several times and the app is not triggered in that case so theres a long list of "not ejected properly notifications"

Obviously, need to re-work that.

There's always the option of unplugging them untill needed but more convenient to be able to leave them

Chiming in with the resolve on issue here. I am using a 3rd party usb3, machine older than usb3. If I change drives to go on the other usb ports the problem does not occur. Is it really a resolve? The issue only happens on pre- catalina with the usb hub "fl1100" I will not use ventura for machine as the processor lacks what is required for it. So wont know if ventura re-introduces that.

Found this thread. Figured I'd chime in, as well. Three weeks ago, I upgraded to a 2023 M2 Pro MacBook Pro with Ventura 13.5.1 (from a 2010 i5 with High Sierra). In that time, I have had only two instances when I have woken my MacBook in the morning to find the dreaded “disk not ejected properly” notification on my screen. Obviously, this is still a problem that Apple REALLY needs to fix. When I'm tethered to my desk, I always have an external drive plugged in for my Time Machine backups (an OWC Mercury Elite Pro HDD directly connected to my Mac (no hubs or adapters), if that matters). I'm thinking of playing around with some of the other apps mentioned in this thread (Jettison, Ejectify) to see if they might be good fixes for the issue.

Another Terminal command you might check out

smbutil smbstat /path/to/mounted/share

after editing sysctl to...

sudo sysctl net.smb.fs.kern_deadtimer=0
net.smb.fs.kern_deadtimer: 60 -> 0

sudo sysctl net.smb.fs.kern_hard_deadtimer=0
net.smb.fs.kern_hard_deadtimer: 600 -> 0

sudo sysctl net.smb.fs.kern_soft_deadtimer=0
net.smb.fs.kern_soft_deadtimer: 30 -> 0

the command...

smbutil smbstat /Volumes/Godzilla

shows this...

Object Type: VDIR 
   flags: 0x0 (none)
   refcnt: 1 
   fid: 0x0-0x0 
   enum flags: 0x0 (none)
   enum count: 0 
   enum timer: 53270 
current time: 54154 
meta data timer: 54127 
finder info timer: 54127 
ACL timer: 0 

lease flags: 0x0 (none)
lease key hi: 0x1942a94f3e4e421e 
lease key low: 0x1c7799f5c08f3898 
lease requested state: 0x3 (read/handle)
lease current state: 0x0 (none) 
lease parent key hi: 0x0 
lease parent key low: 0x0 
lease epoch: 0 
lease def close reuse count: 0 

Yeah, I have the "prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off" setting enabled, still getting the warning about drive not being ejected properly. My Time Machine disk, ofc. Ventura 13.5.2.

This has been happening for a while. I can't tell if it's a hollow warning or if there might be some data corruption, but it makes me question the integrity of Time Machine.

andrus wrote:

Yeah, I have the "prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off" setting enabled, still getting the warning about drive not being ejected properly. My Time Machine disk, ofc. Ventura 13.5.2.

This has been happening for a while. I can't tell if it's a hollow warning or if there might be some data corruption, but it makes me question the integrity of Time Machine.

All drives are mounted with the write ahead cache enabled, so it’s possible that the drive could still be writing data after the Mac finishes sending it, but in the case of the Mac going to sleep and the drive being ejected during the cached write, that is probably not a possibility

Found this thread and wanted to share the odd issue I am having with ejecting drives. I have a LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt 3 that was connect to a 2017 iMac Pro running Sonoma. I never had issues with the drives ejecting throughout the years and various operating systems. Now the problem... I picked up a new MacBook Pro M3 and connected the LaCie to it. While using the computer I will get the dreaded "disk not ejected properly" error. This occurs even while a Time Machine backup is running on the drive. Another odd thing I noticed is that I have a Focus automation set at night when I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning. Let's say it is set at 7:30 am to turn off the sleep focus. If I am using my MacBook at the time Focus changes from Sleep to no focus, the drives get ejected. The computer itself never goes to sleep, the focus mode just simply turns off any sounds and notifications. I've made adjustments using terminal and running latest firmware but no luck. So I reconnected the LaCie to the iMac Pro and let it run for over a week, never ejected. Connected it back to the MacBook and it ejected the drives after 2 hours. Ugh.

I just upgraded from a late 2012 Mac Mini to a brand new MacBook Pro 16˝ with an M3 chip running Sonoma, and I'm STILL having this problem. I've tried all the fix suggestions I can find short of reformatting the hard drive. Not sure how that would help as this problem has occurred with all external hard drives. I am waiting for help from appgineers to migrate my mountain.app to the MacBook. I don't know if mountain.app will help, but that is one of its claims. It is the only thing close to a solution I have found. I sort of regret not choosing a larger INTERNAL hard drive when purchasing my MacBook, so I could have avoided this problem.