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

Top-ranking reply

perlboy_emeritus

Level 1

12 points

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.

View in context

External Drives STILL ejecting during sleep in Ventura

Similar questions