Disk not ejected properly

I have the same issue. Any clue how to fix it?

I'm having this problem after I "upgraded" to the M1 Pro MacBook Pro. The disks got randomly ejected like crazy. It almost always got ejected after been woken up from sleep, and sometimes ejects itself even if I'm actively using it (like copying files). I'm 100% certain my disks / cables are not the culprit because I still use them on my old Intel Mac and they work flawlessly. I think this is some hardware driver issue (maybe insufficient current? I have two 5TB external HDDs)

However, after I updated to macOS Ventura 13.4, the issue seem to have been fixed. My two disks are plugged in for a week now without ejecting itself (what a miracle!). I'll need to keep observing to see if this is actually fixed or I'm just somehow getting lucky.

i also have some problem. but the issue is solved when I find which process is accuping the disk. The reason my be that when you get your mac sleeped your mac would try to sleep your disk also.

I have the same issue to use my external 2TB usb disk. My solution is to change to Apple type-c to type-c cable. Instead use USB disk's cable. Everything is fine now. Just for your reference.

Same issue here, but it only happens with one WD external drive. "Disk not ejected properly" message appears about 20 times when I open turn on my work Mac in the morning. Drive is still connected.

Happens on the Mac Mini, and also on my Macbook. Tried 3 different cords, 2 different ports on the Macbook, and 4 different ports on the Mac Mini.

No recent software updates.

So it's not a hardware or software problem on wither computer.

Disk Utility - drive checks out okay.

I'm going to try reformatting the drive next and see what happens.

I have the same issue with a LaCie Rugged 5TB USB-C HDD, and a Mac mini M1 running macOS Sonoma 14.3. I've done a very long investigation with the Apple Support team and Genius Bar, and with Seagate support chat. My findings so far for my issue, in case it's helpful:

• Easy way to reproduce: put the computer to sleep and wait 3 minutes. There should be a popup.
• As someone mentioned, after some days, it may start failing even when working with it. I get a popup every 2 minutes, constant rate. Restarting the Mac fixes this issue (restart in safe mode to restart the NVRAM just in case), and it's back to just failing on sleep.
• It happens with other Macs, on macOS Sonoma. We tried other Macs in the Genius Bar.
• It DOES NOT happen when using a USB-C to USB-A cable.
• It DOES NOT happen when using a 240W thunderbolt charge cable (the £29 cable).
• It does happen when using the expensive (£75) Thunderbolt 4 data cable (100W according to the specs).

I called Apple support again. The engineer explained that when you connect the drive to the computer, there’s a handshake that determines whether to use Thunderbolt, or regular USB-C. Even if the port looks the same, Thunderbolt and USB-C are actually different connections. The Mac must think it’s thunderbolt even if I use a regular USB-C cable. And then it’s when it becomes unstable. When it goes to sleep, it tries to keep a register of the connection so it doesn’t have to do another handshake, or spark a new connection again. Then, when it wakes up it sends data as it was Thunderbolt, when it’s not.

That’s the explanation I got and I was suggested to keep using the 240W thunderbolt charge cable. That doesn’t seem to explain why it didn’t work with the Thunderbolt 4 cable, though.

However, Seagate asked me to do some speed tests with the different cables. If you are doing this, I recommend using a big file to get consistent results. I zipped my local Movies folder, and that gave me a 1GB ZIP file. To test the copying speed from the Mac mini SSD drive to the external drive, I used rsync. You can use it like this (“LaCie 5TB” is the name of my HDD):

rsync -ah --progress ~/Movies.zip /Volumes/LaCie\ 5TB

I tried with the Apple cable I got in the Apple store, and with the original LaCie cable:

• With 240W thunderbolt charge cable: 36.87 Mbytes/sec
• With USB-C to USB-A adapter cable (for reference): 38.21 Mbytes/sec
• With USB-C cable from LaCie: 123.62 Mbytes/sec

So it’s much slower with the charge cable, as slow as using USB-A 😢 But I can’t reliably use the LaCie cable. Or the £75 Thunderbolt 4 data transfer cable. Seagate says the drive is compatible with both Thunderbolt 4 and USB-C. The Mac Mini M1 port is Thunderbolt 3.

Seagate escalated this issue and they told me to wait 24 hours. I will also try to contact Apple again, because I'd really like to use the faster speeds.