Hi everyone, there are dozens of these threads around the internet: an external drive, usually USB, unmounts itself at random leading to a bunch of annoying messages being piled up, performance issues, and sometimes data corruption. This isn't new and has been going on for years as a plague on Macs. If you look around, most suggestions relate to replacing the cable, preventing the drive from entering "sleep" mode, or transferring the drive to a port with more power (assuming the drive is powered by the USB port and/or on a hub).
I've noted a slightly different performance issue and wanted to see if anyone else had it, and if they found a solution. In my case, it seems like other USB devices cause instability on my drives. A few years ago I had drive unmounting issues that seemed to target one drive for a while, and then another. I found one post suggesting that a USB hub could become faulty, and sure enough, the removal of one of my two USB hubs brought about a period of stability and only very rare random unmount issues.
More recently, within the past few months I purchased a numpad to use alongside my tenkeyless keyboard. It seemed fine, but after upgrading to macOS 11 "Big Sur" I began to experience unmount issues and even kernel panics. I unplugged all of my USB devices and the system stabilized. I've slowly been plugging things back in, and it seems like the numpad is causing one of my USB drives to randomly eject.
For now, I'm continuing to troubleshoot by trying to insert it into different USB ports, but was curious if anyone else had come across something similar, and if there's a faster and easier fix for it.
I've noted a slightly different performance issue and wanted to see if anyone else had it, and if they found a solution. In my case, it seems like other USB devices cause instability on my drives. A few years ago I had drive unmounting issues that seemed to target one drive for a while, and then another. I found one post suggesting that a USB hub could become faulty, and sure enough, the removal of one of my two USB hubs brought about a period of stability and only very rare random unmount issues.
More recently, within the past few months I purchased a numpad to use alongside my tenkeyless keyboard. It seemed fine, but after upgrading to macOS 11 "Big Sur" I began to experience unmount issues and even kernel panics. I unplugged all of my USB devices and the system stabilized. I've slowly been plugging things back in, and it seems like the numpad is causing one of my USB drives to randomly eject.
For now, I'm continuing to troubleshoot by trying to insert it into different USB ports, but was curious if anyone else had come across something similar, and if there's a faster and easier fix for it.
