M1 Mac Mini External Hard Drive Issues

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M1 Mac Mini External Hard Drive Issues

I have an M1 Mac Mini and it has had several issues with external hard drives. For I time I had two 4TB HDDs connected via USB. They would run fine, and then they would randomly disconnect. The computer is set to never sleep and is generally not connected to a display. In response to this, I placed them in a thunderbolt enclosure in a RAID 1 configuration. This too repeatedly failed. I replaced the HDDs and had similar failures.

I attempted connecting the HDDs directly and individually again, this time through USBs connected to a powered dock connected to the Mini via USB C. I experienced random disconnects. The drives appear healthy and were, at the time, new.

I gave up on that approach, determining that the issue may have had to do with power for the Mini. I switched to two 2T T7 SSDs attached via USB 3. For a couple months, this seemed to prevent any further random disconnects.

However, within the last two weeks I have encountered a new phenomenon.

Here is what is happening:

Occasionally, and without warning, the drives' permissions go from read/write owned by MYUSER:STAFF to read-only owned by ROOT.
The /Volumes directory has the old names for the mountpoints, but usually at the end there is now a 1 or 2 behind the name.
A reboot resolves the issue and everything functions normally thereafter.
This happens to the partitions on both drives. It may happen to those on one of the drives, on the other, or both.
This seems to happen once every day or so.

I have tested the drives for errors, not finding any.

I have attempted eliminate the possibility of power fluctuations (my house's lights flicker presently for unknown reasons) by plugging into a UPS rather than to a simple surge protector.

I am on the most recent version of macOS 13.3.1 as of the writing of this.

At this juncture I am not sure where else I should look or steps I should consider to troubleshoot this issue.

Posted on Apr 13, 2023 10:20 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

jmarse1

Community Specialist

Apr 17, 2023 2:15 PM in response to Lance Truthhammer

Hi Lance Truthhammer,

We'll be glad to look into this with you further. Since this only recently started happening; have there been any changes to your system or software installations you completed around the time this began? We ask because you mentioned it worked fine for a long period, then started having issues again.

If you're unsure, we'd recommend testing in safe mode to see if this occurs, as that will prevent any 3rd party software from starting up with your Mac. The following article shows how to enter safe mode: Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

Give that a try and let us know the results.

Cheers.

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Answer 2

Apr 18, 2023 3:29 PM in response to jmarse1

Thank you. That is helpful. It makes the most sense that it may be related to other software, in light of it being more recent. I will note that, after posting this, I have not seen the issue reoccur. This weekend, I will seek to have it run in safe mode and further test.

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Answer 3

May 2, 2023 2:27 PM in response to hcsitas

Thank you, hcsitas. Those are good suggestions; however, I can confirm that those settings were set to prevent automatic sleeping.

The issue seems to have been resolved. My suspicion is that either a software or OS update fixed the issue.

In digging deeper through the suggestions above, I did learn that I had created a sleep schedule through pmset, which appears to only now be accessible through terminal commands -- given the updates to the settings menu in Ventura.

In light of that discovery, I believe that the earlier disconnects were primarily related to the sleep schedule that I could not view, and that the more recent disconnects were related to a software issue that has since been resolved.

I appreciate all of the suggestions and help.

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