MacBook Air 13" (Intel, 2020) Crashing when Using External Hard Drive

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Level 1

8 points

MacBook Air 13" (Intel, 2020) Crashing when Using External Hard Drive

I have a 2020 MacBook Air with Intel. Every time I plug in my external hard drive (WD My Passport for Mac) and start moving files around on the external hard drive my Mac will crash. The screen will go blank for a few seconds then shows a message that says "Your computer restarted because of a problem." It will do this after about five minutes of use or when I'm moving a big file. It will also randomly disconnect the external hard drive saying "external hard drive was disconnected without being ejected."

The mac OS is Ventura 13.2.1

I've run disk utility and first aid on the external hard drive and everything is working.

How do I fix this?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.2

Posted on Aug 11, 2023 9:02 AM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

158,208 points

Aug 19, 2023 10:19 AM in response to Layton13

The WD My Passport drives are USB-bus powered. To add a bit to ku4hx's reply, this drive may be trying to draw too much power from your Mac's USB port and causing the crashes.

We can get a better idea by reviewing any kernel panic reports that your Mac has generated ... but, I'm pretty sure that the drive will be the culprit.

Finally, have you tried mounting this drive on another computer?

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Answer 2

ku4hx

Level 7

23,694 points

Aug 19, 2023 9:22 AM in response to Layton13

If the drive is consistently causing the crashing, the only conclusion is the drive is defective regardless of what FA says.

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MacBook Air 13" (Intel, 2020) Crashing when Using External Hard Drive

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