Disk Not Ejected Properly
The USB device drivers report that they are destroying the “Rocket XTRM Q” device due to a “link change interrupt”
APFS filesystem drivers report a “dangling mount”, failures to finish transactions before unmount, and dozens of “media is not present” errors.[…]
storagekit collects a report of the “disappeared” devices and notices that one of them was mounted. This is ultimately what leads to the “Disk Not Ejected Properly” notification.
Unfortunately, nothing in here explains what caused the “link change interrupt”; all we know is that the USB device drivers detected an interruption.
Not discussed here, perhaps because there’s little we can do about it, is the role of changes to macOS. I’ve documented problems in the past of hard drives, which used to work perfectly, suddenly start spontaneously unmounting with every backup after updating to a new OS version. The Sierra to Big Sur period was particularly bad, as I recall. (There are also some hard drive enclosures, and cheap SSDs, that seem to be problematic to matter the OS version, but I don’t continue to use those.) Sometime around Monterey or Ventura, the spontaneous unmounts almost completely disappeared for me, though Ventura introduced other mounting/unmounting problems. Last week, I finally updated to Tahoe, and I’m sad to say that spontaneous unmounts are back. Almost every night, one of my Samsung SSDs—connected to a Thunderbolt dock—gets reported as improperly ejected. Sometimes it remounts by itself; other times I have to unplug and replug it.
Previously:
- Upgrading My Mac’s External SSD
- Remaining Issues in Big Sur
- OWC Dual Drive Dock USB 3.1
- Some Known Bugs in macOS 10.12.6
- RocketStor Drive Dock: More Expensive But Reliable
- Highpoint RocketStor 5212 Thunderbolt Dual Drive Dock
- Ejecting External Disks With macOS 13
- Ventura Issues
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I've continued to have sporadic problems with this in Sonoma, Sequoia, and Tahoe. I'm not sure I've seen it yet in Golden Gate, but it's harder to know whether it still happens when you're rebooting for an update every two weeks, as sometimes I go a month or more without my Time Machine disk disappearing (whereas other times it happens every day for a week, for no obvious reason).
I used to have terrible problems with this in macOS Sequoia, using a USB hub, or connected directly.
After I switched to an OWC Thunderbolt 4 dock with a really good cable, the problem completely went away. I have a suspicion that OWC is doing something differently than other TB dock makers, but not sure.
On Ventura, I have problems with NVME SSDs on a PCI card, that they will unmount if I read too heavily from the drive. Say, going through large RAW images with Quicklook, or using Smart Folders that return tens of thousands of images, and scrolling through that in icon view.
It has been remarked that the 2023 Apple Silicon Mac Pro, for which NVME storage was really the only use case, coincided with macOS Sonoma, which made these sorts of problems endemic. A full plug-out power cycle is usually the only way to get the system to recognise these drives after they unmount otherwise they're just not there in disk util, etc after a regular reboot.
It has also been remarked, that around the Sonoma era saw the mass storage driver in macOS replaced with an iOS / iPadOS derived version, which never had to deal with PCI *slot* storage, where plug / unplug was not available.
