External USB hard drives disconnecting randomly on Sequoia (worked great under Sonoma)

I have a Mac Studio M1 Ultra, I never had any problems with my external drives on Sonoma, 28 drives that are powered by rack mounted power source in my studio.

I used a powered USB hub to run other drives to the Mac.

Once I updated to Sequioa all **** broke loose, the drives would keep disconnecting randomly, not show up, and then it fried a powered hub rendering it unusable, and rendered a Seagate 2.5“ also unusable and cannot mount on any computer, will no longer recognise a 4 bay drive enclosure,

changed the cables to the Mac Studio and was the same problem.

Ended up reinstalling OS Sonoma spending the last 4 days putting all of my software back on.

Please Fix This Bug Apple!

I resolved the issue after working with an Apple support person. I have an MBP M1 Pro with MacOS 15.1.1. and I had failures with TM both on NAS and hard wired backups. My workaround, as per the boards, was to to turn off the MacOS Firewall to let the backups work to completion.

However, I also have a cyber security software which includes a firewall of its own. There is a conflict between its firewall and the MacOS one starting with Sequoia 15.x. After I turned off the security software firewall and left the Mac OS one active, all TM backups work without error. The 3rd party cyber security software firewalls need to be updated for Sequoia.

How are the drives connected to your Mini: directly or thru a dock or hub? If the latter the dock or hub must be self powered.

Jessecee904 wrote:

Please Fix This Bug Apple!

Apple engineers do not visit these forums. If you want to get your issues to Apple use Feedback - macOS - Apple.