Odd Problems With External Hard Drives Files Disappear After Renaming Folders Then Cannot eject

[Sossity]

I have encountered this multiple times, and am puzzled and fear my drives will get corrupted.

After being connected via USB 2, my external SSDs will begin to act weird; I will need to rename a folder with files in it, and then it seems the files disappear. I read about this, and one solution was to eject the disk and reconnect. This has worked sometimes.

I had this problem, tried to disconnect, and then I would get an error message from the OS saying the disk cannot be ejected some programs might be using it, and the only option I am given is to force eject. I have not done that for fear of corrupting the drive.

I read about this, and have tried, logging in and out of my account, does not work, quitting and restarting finder, does not work. I finally have to just shut down my computer, is the only thing that works.

When I boot back up, my drive acts normally again, can rename folders with files, and eject.

Why is this happening, and I do not want to have to keep shutting my computer down to get them to work properly each time.

 

[Slartibart]

What version of MacOS are you using? which Mac model? what SSD model? What file system does the SSD use?

 

[Sossity]

MacOs high Sierra 10.13.6, cMP 2010, SSD; SanDisk Extreme portable 2 TB.

 

[Brian33]

I would run Disk Utility's First Aid process on the drive and see what it says.

 

[Sossity]

I have run disk utility on it before, and said it was ok.

 

[hobowankenobi]

How are the drives formatted? HFS+ would be best. I would consider wiping one and formatting and then testing to see if it behaves any different.

I have seen some USB on older Macs behave very erratically with some drives. Seems like certain external USB chipsets are just not happy with the internal that Apple was using at the time. Outside chance it might be OS related, but always seemed like hardware to me.

One way to check would be to test with other machines of other vintages, to see if the problem persists. If the problem follows the drive...you can rule out specific USB/OS stuff with the host computer. If the problems disappear with other Macs, then it is not the external drive/enclosure.

Hope this...is not that.

 

[Sossity]

I believe the drive is exfat, but I have had issues with HFS drives as well. That might be possible, my cMP is USB 2.0, and most of the drives today are USB 3.0, or even USB 31., 3.2.

I do have disk drill running in the background showing the temperature of my cMP, and I notice it has all my other drives in its list as well. I even tried ejecting from Disk Drill, and had the same issue, cannot eject because one or more programs are using it.