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My second motherboard replacement on a 2018 mini fixed that issue. But all I got were the messages. The drives were still mounted. That particular mini is sitting in its box in storage. Will be used for my next trade-in. More than pleased to get rid of it.
 
Having a similar issue with USB drives seemingly disconnecting on their own when the MBP goes to sleep. Haven't had this problem before. Only noticed it on the new MBP (which has Monterey).
 
This is an issue on my iMac as well. I have a number of drives connected, both directly to the iMac's USB 3.0 ports, as well as through a OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock.

This seemed to become an issue for me with Big Sur 11.6 and has persisted through Monterey 12.0.1 & I am hoping 12.1 final will bring some remedy.

For myself there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the disconnections.

I have the iMac set to only sleep the display, so machine sleep should not be in play here.

I have come back to all drives with a disconnection notification when waking the display, and have also just had them all disconnect right in front of me while using the computer. It is totally random.

They do however reconnect right away on their own with no intervention from me.

I may break out Amphetamine again if it persists. Have had no disconnections in a couple days at present.
 
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Forgot this thread and replied to the other.
New ssd (nvme) directly connected and un encrypted apfs remains connected when all the others disconnect. Though most of the others are spinning encrypted apfs and one unencrypted hfs. The encrypted sata (?) ssd also disconnects.


Edit. After 12.1 update, still happening.
 
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I have M2 Mac mini and I just upgraded to Monterey. I have a external Seagate 8TB hub attached via a Cal Digit Element. Ever since upgrading to Monterey, every time I wake the computer from sleep, I get a bunch of "Disk Not Ejected Properly."

I've tried turning turning on "Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping..." but no luck.View attachment 1899604
I've just upgraded my Mid-2015 MacBook Pro to 12.1 Monterey, and get the exact same thing on the SD card. It never occurred until Monterey. I leap-frogged past Big Sur, so I don't know if it would have happened there. It has to be an OS bug of some kind (or a now-buried setting change). It's crap like this that made me resist upgrading from Catalina - but no, I had to go and spoil it ...
 
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I've just upgraded my Mid-2015 MacBook Pro to 12.1 Monterey, and get the exact same thing on the SD card. It never occurred until Monterey. I leap-frogged past Big Sur, so I don't know if it would have happened there. It has to be an OS bug of some kind (or a now-buried setting change). It's crap like this that made me resist upgrading from Catalina - but no, I had to go and spoil it ...
Today, I noticed that it's also happening with my bluetooth mouse (mac mouse). Normally all I need to do is click the mouse for the connection to "wake up", but now it looks like I need to turn BT off and on again. I'll keep testing, and if it's consistent I may revert to Catalina via a TM restore.
 
Disk "not ejected properly" still happening all the time on 12.1, on my Mac Mini M1. Out of 4 disks it only happens to one, and only happens when it's connected by the usb-c or usb-a port directly on the Mac Mini. if I connect it to my usb hub that's attached to usb-a to the Mini, the messages stop entirely.

Funny enough, I only get bluetooth constant disconnects on my Intel MBP, to the point where I just connect them with usb because this is impacting my ability to work. Not getting disk messages on the Intel one though. Sigh...
 
I had this problem, and eventually replaced the hub (after some diagnostics). Problem went away. Until...I upgraded to a new 2021 MBP (M1). Now it's there every time the machine sleeps. Sometimes a few, sometimes many. NB: hard drive plugged into hub, it's USB 2.0 or so, not -C. Given that it's a relatively new hub, I don't suspect that's the problem. And works fine while the machine's awake (backing up now). So something about sleep, Monterey, and the M1 processor. Hope it's something they can fix in software.
 
Does this problem still occurs when Jettison is installed? This application ejects external disks before sleeping. (St Claire software)
 
M1 Mac Mini here. I have been having the same problem since I upgraded to Monterey. I never had this issue before on BigSur. Started happening since the day I upgrade to Monterey. The worst thing for me is that I have my home directory on the external SSD and every time this error happens I lose my home directory and the OS helpfully creates a new home directory for me. Then I have to restart, login as admin and move my home directory back. Happens almost every day and is a total hassle.

Does anyone know if I disable the setting to put the hard drives to sleep, is that going to be bad for the SSD?
 
I have this problem often, but it seems to be related more to the TB plugs. No matter what high end cable I use, if I so much as look at the plug, it disconnects. The TB connections are very sensitive even if you don't move the mac around while connected.
 
I'm having this problem with SD cards directly unplugged from the back slot on my 2019 iMac. The card was ejected before the computer went to sleep, but when it awakes, it gives me the error message, "Disk not ejected properly...", even though I ejected the disk beforehand. It didn't do this until I upgraded to Monterey. Nothing else has changed in my config.
 
I'm not a big fan of St Clair Software (Jon Gotow's Default Folder caused intermittent hard crashes on my Mac Pro for about six months more than ten years ago due to incorporation of a very unstable Unsanity Haxie) but the latest version of their Jettison appears to successfully force eject all drives before putting an M1 Max to sleep. It's not perfect (there should be error messages for files in use) but it's a heck of a lot better than the twenty mount and unmount Disk Not Ejected Properly I get when I use normal sleep.
 
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It's occurred to me that it might be possible to do the same thing in Keyboard Maestro which Jettison does, which is:

1. eject all drives
2. put the computer to sleep

I already own Jettison (and Keyboard Maestro) so will probably carry on with Jettison but if somebody has the time to build a robust macro for Keyboard Maestro it would be worth sharing.
 
I've been having the same problem with my MacPro. I have a Promise Pegasus R2 4 directly plugged into my MacPro's thunderbolt connection. I use the Promise Utility (which is up-to-date) for the drives in my Pegasus unit. I bought new hard drives for the unit so it shouldn't be a matter of the drives being too old or of them being corrupted. All of them show as "perfect" when I run diagnostics. I also have a LaCie external drive plugged into the MacPro. However, it is plugged into a USB port. I've read in other forums that the issue has to do with thunderbolt connections, i.e., Monterey isn't equipped to deal with them properly. With a Promise Pegasus, I must use a thunderbolt port. Replacing Promise Pegasus and all of the hard drives is NOT an option. Waaay too much money investested. I'm at my wit's end trying to solve this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
I'm having the same problem on an iMac Pro after upgrading to Monterey. Has anyone discovered what the root cause is and how to correct it or is it a bug in the Mac OS? My biggest problem is that it drops off my external 8GB Time Machine hard drive, which I can't remount without a restart.
 
I don't remember if I had this issue when I was running Mojave on my 2018 Mac Mini or not. The problem has definitely happened now and then with Catalina, Big Sur and Monterey.
 
I’ve got this message at least once on my MacBook Air M1, and that was when it updated from 12.2 to 12.3.1 a couple days ago. It might have been an erroneous error message as the Samsung T5 was up and running fine at the time of the message. Or it could be that the brilliant Apple coders screwed up the process of disconnecting and reconnecting external drives during a restart.
 
I'm having the same problem on an iMac Pro after upgrading to Monterey. Has anyone discovered what the root cause is and how to correct it or is it a bug in the Mac OS? My biggest problem is that it drops off my external 8GB Time Machine hard drive, which I can't remount without a restart.
I ended up replacing my hub, and it mostly eliminated the issue. It still occasionally happens, but it’s not as frequent. I never had this issue until Monterey.
 
Same here, but with my Time Machine networked drive (a USB hdd connected to a Mac mini).
Same here, but mine is a network share (using SMB) on a Synology NAS. Backups are completing fine, though, so for me it seems to be just “cosmetic” for now. The funny thing is, my other shares all use AFP (haven’t had time to migrate them to SMB yet, and some software seems to like AFP better anyway), and none of those AFP shares have shown this issue yet, at the time of writing this. So, whatever is causing this issue for both local and (Samba) network drives, seems not to be applicable to AFP network drives.
Unfortunately, Apple has deprecated the use of AFP for Time Machine, so migrating back to it for that share is out of the question...
 
Same issue on my M1 Max Mac Studio, external drive is directly connected into the TB4 port.
"put hard disk to sleep whenever possible" option is already unchecked but still sometimes "disk not ejected properly" message pops up after waking up from sleep.
 
I get this too with a variety of external drives. Here's my question. If so many people are reporting this with various devices... why isn't this likely a Mac OS problem?
 
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There are MANY threads about this issue both here and on other sites, including Apple's own support forums. I've been pounding through EVERY possible user-controllable solution offered in ALL threads: cables, powered hubs, power settings, the sudo change to set external drive sleep to the max, etc. Here are my conclusions from much testing:
  • Monterey likely has external drive bugs.
  • It doesn't matter if you connect via USB-A or USB-C.
  • It isn't only about Time Machine drives but ANY drives can do this. The key seems to be connection type, how long a drive is connected and maybe age of enclosure.
  • It isn't only about sleep but sleep seems to be the easiest catalyst to make it happen. I've had definitely-awake external drives transferring files to definitely-awake Mac Studio unexpectedly eject during a file transfer... so neither could possibly be asleep.
  • It seems to be an issue much more prevalent with HDD-based externals than SSD externals. Single drive HDD boxes seem to work much better than RAID HDDs. RAID SSDs seem to generally "just work."
  • Probably has nothing to do with formatting, though I haven’t seen enough of this to feel pretty confident about this one.
  • While some think powered hubs make the difference, I have tested through THREE powered hubs by 3 different manufacturers. It appears to resolve the problem for some but not for others. All 3 could not resolve it for me with an external drive also powered.
  • the . upgrades to Monterey seem to have each got some declarations of "problem solved" only to have some come back later saying it had returned.
  • Some seem to be having better luck with thunderbolt drives using the thunderbolt protocol, so this may be (probably is) more of a USB issue. But again, not only USB-A... USB-C seems- in my experience- to be no better at combating this issue.
  • There seems to be an even bigger issue with older RAID HDD boxes, though latest generation boxes from Lacie and OWC have been reported to work by some. I have one purchased new in 2018 that is perfectly functional with 2 Intel-based Macs running macOS < Big Sur but- through the same cable and all else being equal- will not stay connected for longer than a few hours max to a brand new Mac Studio running Monterey (including during cycles where that Studio definitely does not get to sleep because I'm steadily using it during those times)
  • While possibly separate from this, I am also noticing an issue with wired Ethernet connections in what I'll call a "blink" of lost connection. Running Dropbox puts the Dropbox icon in the menu bar. When Internet is disconnected, it "grays" out signifying no connection. On the Monterey Studio, it is "blinking" off regularly throughout the day. On wired Intel Macs, it is a much more stable connection. Before Dropbox gets the redirect blame, I opened Airport Utility to simply monitor "blinks" and I see regular "blinks"... especially when UPLOADING files within a local network (to a Synology NAS for example). These are brief (a few seconds) but feel like the Ethernet connection "crashes" and then "boots up" again over and over throughout the day. Is there some relationship between ALL ports (USB, Thunderbolt and Ethernet)... perhaps some kind of central controller that might share a bug(s)? If so, and USB jacks are also "blinking," would that explain the "unexpected ejections"? Counter to this gut feel, single drive HDDs and most SSDs seem to be long-term stable. In another thread, a user seemed to have found a partial solution to this (ethernet "blink") problem by unchecking one box in the Network connections "advanced" options, which did significantly reduce downloading "blinks" but doesn't seem to do anything for uploading "blinks."
Bottom line: Having tried EVERYTHING a user can, I'm mostly convinced there IS a bug(s) in Monterey. Apple fans are quick to redirect blame to anything & everything else (firmware, cables, third party hardware, hubs, etc) but anyone with an Intel Mac running macOS < Big Sur is likely to find that a problematic drive works FINE when reconnected to Intel Macs running pre-Big Sur macOS. Hook the same through the same cable to a Monterey Mac and you'll have a fair chance of "unexpected ejections." Remove any middleman options like hub for a direct connection and you are likely to STILL see the problem, which can then be immediately resolved by direct connect to Intel Macs running macOS BEFORE Big Sur or Windows in bootcamp.

There are also a good number of reports of Intel Macs working fine BEFORE upgrading to Big Sur or Monterey and then this happening to Intel Macs too after upgrading. For me, this one thing implies it's probably not Mac hardware but Big Sur/Monterey software.

Resolution: from countless interactions with many people, the resolution until hopefully Apple gets around to debugging this part of macOS seems to be to try new enclosures. Some enclosures work and others don't. Apparently U in USB means something different than intended right now. If you go this way, buy from someone with a good return policy. Basically, we are all guinea pigs with USB.

I have (hopefully temporarily) given up on a 2018 OWC RAID HDD box but a single HDD in OWC Mini Stack STX has been stably connected for a few weeks. Another user picked up the latest OWC RAID HDD box and claims it is remaining stably connected to their Studio. Another user claims the current generation Lacie 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 RAID HDDs remain consistently connected. Anyone working with SSDs seem to generally not have this problem, including RAID SSD boxes. Thunderbolt connections seem more stable than USB (which is what I've switched to myself in the link to that Mini Stack). Short connects & then manual ejects generally won't show this issue: it's LEAVING IT CONNECTED for at least several hours- especially through a Mac sleep cycle where one is most likely to experience this. However, it can be as fast as only minutes too.

In short: very new hardware seems more likely to work than even stuff only a few years old. But the game to be played is not what U in USB stands for... more "hit or miss" lottery where something you buy new MIGHT work. Good luck to all and I hope this post helps you.
 
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