External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

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.

Strange . . . this just happened when I plugged in a SanDisk Extreme GO 1 TB drive into my Macbook Pro M1. Kept seeing the "disk not ejected properly" message. I tried another SSD (a SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB, let the computer go to sleep a few times and each time never saw the message. Going to try the GO again with a the Pro cable and see if that makes any difference.

I have tried multiple Hard Drive Enclosures trying to resolve this, and I found one last Sept that seems to have stabilized this eject issue with me: https://a.co/d/5rFobHY

At the same time I also updated my drive to a Western Digital 18TB WD Purple Pro: https://a.co/d/chxrz9i So, I'm not positive which one helped the most (pretty sure it's the enclosure), but I only get random ejects every few weeks now.

I also minimized what USB accessories I plug in, ever since I discovered one of my USB hubs seemed to make the problem worse. I hope this helps!

I appreciate the the suggestion, but I'm a photographer, not a programmer, so the above it beyond me. Second, if there is what appears to be such a simple solution why have not Apple fixed this problem which has persisted for years?

DarkSchneider_ wrote:

Not sure why it has been posted at first page instead at the end of the thread.

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FWIW I have been stuggling with this for a few months now since buying a Seagate 12TB desktop drive.

I've actually upgraded to Sonoma but have the same issue.

I can shed a little light on this though - it appears that the issue is related to the firmware on the external drive.

I have 2xLacie 8TB Porsche design drives and the 16TB Seagate. The issue is only ever with the Seagate, the Lacie are always mounted without any issues. I'm using an M1 MacBook Pro and have the drives running from the built in hub on my Studio Display. Moving the Seagate to a free port directly on the Mac makes no difference. The Mac is pretty well always run in clamshell mode.

The Seagate is not consistent. It will sometimes disconnect overnight while other times it's fine. I even tried mounting it to a separate machine - a MacBook Air M1 - and had the same issue. It's annoying because the Seagate is my Time Machine drive. Luckily I also have TM set to backup to my NAS, so I have alternating backups.

I suspect that it's something to do with the way some controllers handle sleep mode. Seagate drives are the only ones that have had this issue for me (I have a portable Seagate that did the same).

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.

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...

It’s unfathomable that this is still an issue. I have two identical and fairly new rugged LaCie that I alternate for TM on an iMac M1 running Monterey, only using the supplied OEM USB-C cable. One of them never ejects, the other one does all the time, making it practically unusable (although it does back up). I have erased, reformatted and reset in all kinds of ways but to no avail. Hardware failure? Any input is much appreciated.

And the hard disks aren't just ejecting after sleep, but multiple times AFTER any sleep session. The only way to avoid this happening, other than Apple just FIXING IT, is to never plug in your external drives after sleep. Which is Lookin' at you, apple. We want a solush!!! We will all love you if you just make our expensive computers WORK properly in this regard.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

I found an answer that worked quite well for me. I had been plagued with this issue for years. For me, the fix was twofold... The first thing I did that started to keep my drive mounted for longer periods of time was to disconnect all my USB hubs. But it still had occasional issues. Then, I started trying different hard drive enclosures. Some worked better than others but, then I found a great one that was very stable, and inexpensive. I put it into service in September 2023 and cannot remember the last time my drive did not eject properly. This is that enclosure: https://a.co/d/2zgoNXK PS: The only thing I have checked in Energy Saver is "Prevent Mac from automatically sleeping when display is off".

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.