External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

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. I know this because I get the “disk not ejected properly” message when I wake the computer.


I suppose my question is this, are we EVER going to get a fix to this long-standing problem? This has been a bug I have dealt with on multiple macs, multiple external drives, and every version of MacOS for at least the last decade. It seems like something Apple should be able to fix, and yet, every time I upgrade to the latest OS I have the smallest hope that this issue might have finally been resolved. Every time I am disappointed to see that it persists. I’m far from the only person with this issue, and it is not a specific machine or OS causing the issue, it is every mac I’ve ever had and every version of MacOS.


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. This is a well known, well-documented , longstanding bug. This is clearly a problem that Apple needs to address and I’m finally annoyed enough to post about it after yet another year of the latest OS failing to address it.


The Mac Studio wasn’t cheap, and part of the expectation a person has around what is supposed to be a powerful, desktop workstation would obviously be that— given its intention as a professional workstation— that it isn’t ejecting external drives just because it needs a nap. Before you ask, yes, the behavior continues even if you turn off “put hard drives to sleep when possible” in the energy saving preferences. The only solution is a third party app like Jettison or to set your energy savings so that the computer never sleeps.


I just want to know if Apple has ever addressed this in any official capacity and if a fix is ever coming for this? The fact that there’s a market for third party apps that have to exist to try and mitigate this long-standing bug should be kind of embarrassing. I don’t get it, you can create your own processors that exceeded everybody’s expectations while running cool to the touch but you can’t get harddrives to stop ejecting? That seems odd. Does Apple plan on addressing this? Have they ever said anything about this at all? If anybody knows, I’d appreciate it.

Mac Studio, macOS 13.0

Posted on Oct 27, 2022 12:35 AM

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Posted on Feb 17, 2023 11:05 AM

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.



Similar questions

127 replies

Apr 26, 2023 11:37 PM in response to perlboy_emeritus

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).

May 21, 2023 5:37 PM in response to KJH1986

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.

May 25, 2023 1:56 PM in response to Barney-15E

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.

Jun 10, 2023 9:43 PM in response to KJH1986

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.

Aug 11, 2023 5:49 PM in response to KJH1986

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.

Aug 31, 2023 6:40 AM in response to KJH1986

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

Aug 31, 2023 7:39 AM in response to SandyLenihan

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.

Aug 31, 2023 8:12 AM in response to KJH1986

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.

Oct 3, 2023 12:16 PM in response to johnnyjackhammer

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 

Nov 13, 2023 9:29 AM in response to KJH1986

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.




Nov 13, 2023 11:38 AM in response to andrus

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

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External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

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