New external rugged La Cie drive icon disappears on 2023 MacBook Pro M2, OS 14.3.1

I was wondering if anyone had this problem. I bought a La Cie 4GB (USB-C cable) rugged drive to use with both Macs and PCs, so I left it in ExFat which is how it shipped. I copied files from a 27-inch iMac running OS 14.2.1 (23C71) and attached the drive to the OS 14.3.1 MBP. Then I ran a McAfee quick scan on the MBP and the La Cie drive. After the scan was done, end of the day, the Mac went to sleep. I had not yet setup Time Machine.

When I opened the Mac, the La Cie drive icon had disappeared from the desktop and finder. I unplugged it and replugged it—still no drive icon. Apple support suggested it might be the cable.

I also thought maybe these actions might have caused the issue: 1) The MacBook Pro went to sleep and ejected the drive; 2) Or, it was the McAfee quick scan.

The result was that the drive would not mount on either Mac, not even with using Disk Utility...all I got was the endless spinning wheel. It would not mount with La Cie Raid Manager. The drive was not recognized by the Macs. I uninstalled McAfee and installed Norton 360.

I wanted to see if I could get an old PC running Windows 10 (USB-A ports) to recognize the drive. I wanted to try and erase the file contents before returning the drive. The only cable I could find in my rural town (over 200 miles to the nearest Apple store) was an Emtec USB-A/USB-C cable.

I downloaded Raid to the PC and plugged in the La Cie drive using the new cable. La Cie Raid did not recognize the La Cie drive. I opened Windows 10 Disk Management and it did recognize the drive. I reformatted the drive in ExFat and replugged it into the MacBook Pro. Not everyone has a PC at hand.

I put the Mac into sleep mode then woke it up. The La Cie icon was still on the desktop. I closed the Mac lid and left it for five minutes. The icon was still there. However, as I was writing this, the icon vanished from the desktop. I unplugged the drive and replugged it in then copied some test files to it, then ran First Aid.

Disk utility > First Aid and got the following error message:

"Checking file system and repairing if necessary and if possible.

Volume could not be unmounted.

Restoring the original state found as mounted.

Unable to unmount volume for repair. : (-69673)

Operation failed..."

External drive compatibility with Apple OS:

I found this online:

"…If you connect the storage device to Mac computers, and you don’t need to allow a Windows computer to read or write to the disk. HFS+ is the only format compatible with Time Machine.

"exFAT—Compatible with Mac and Windows. exFAT is not a journaled file system which means it can be more susceptible to data corruption when errors occur or the drive is not disconnected properly from the computer.

Mac OS Extended (HFS+)—An Apple file system optimized for macOS 10.12 and earlier. This file system remains the best option for external hard hard drives and is the only format compatible with Time Machine. Windows cannot natively read or write to HFS+ (journaled) volumes."

Mac OS Extended (HFS+) is the same as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as shown in Disk Utility.

Best practice seems to be to reformat any drive from ExFat to HFS+ to avoid issues.