USB-A Hub and External HD Causes Restart on M4 Mac Mini w/ Sequoia

[Omek]

I have this wall-powered hub connected to a thunderbolt port on my new M4 Mac Mini:

https://www.amazon.com/Powered-Rosonway-Aluminum-Expander-RSH-A107D/dp/B0C53RCSNL?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1

Whenever I plug in my spinning external hard drives, and use them for about a few minutes. My system freezes and then restarts. I'm using the latest version of Sequoia.

I had this same issue with my mom's M2 mini on Ventura. I just thought something was wrong with hers for the longest time. She has a wall-powered USB-A hub like mine, but it's the Anker brand. We ended up getting the Amphetamine app, and just keeping a low enough ping time interval to prevent the drive from sleeping.

It's the weirdest behavior I've ever seen in a Mac, but it seems to be systemic to the M Macs. I can't believe this is still happening with the M4s though. I thought Apple would fix it by now. Is the only option to run Amphetamine? I hate to run it, because I think it might be lowering the life of the drive. I do have SSDs, but I'd like to continue to use these older drives for storage too. Any ideas?

 

[Bigwaff]

It's the weirdest behavior I've ever seen in a Mac, but it seems to be systemic to the M Macs.

Two Macs don't make an issue systemic. How many external HDD are attached to the USB hub? Are the external drives bus powered?

 

[Omek]

It's just one external HDD and it's not bus powered, but the hub is wall-powered. The drive is HFS+ though. I've been reading in forums that Sequoia isn't playing nicely with HFS+ drives all the sudden. I've tried a few external NVMEs and a SATA SSD via the direct thunderbolt ports and haven't had any issues with those.

 

[Bigwaff]

It's just one external HDD and it's not bus powered,

What is the brand, model, and specs of the external enclosure, as well as the HDD?

 

[Fishrrman]

"The drive is HFS+ though. I've been reading in forums that Sequoia isn't playing nicely with HFS+ drives all the sudden."

Platter-based drives SHOULD be HFS+ unless there's a specific reason to make them APFS.
I don't think that has anything to do with it.

Having said that...
If it's "just one external HDD", not bus powered, why don't you just plug it directly into the Mac?
(no hub)

 

[Omek]

What is the brand, model, and specs of the external enclosure, as well as the HDD?

It's an Orico, and the hard drive is a 7200 RPM 2.5" 500 GB WD. I had gotten the drive for my late 2011 Macbook Pro, but when I upgraded to an SSD, I put it in an enclosure and used it as an external. I've never had issues with this drive. Also my mom had a variety of WD external hard drives, and they all did this in Ventura on an M2 Mac mini. Although hers took awhile to freeze the system. This time in Sequoia on my M4 Mini, it just froze and force restarted after about 2 minutes.

I'm honestly afraid to plugin any other SATA external into this USB-A hub, because I don't want these ejections to start corrupting the drives.

"The drive is HFS+ though. I've been reading in forums that Sequoia isn't playing nicely with HFS+ drives all the sudden."

Platter-based drives SHOULD be HFS+ unless there's a specific reason to make them APFS.
I don't think that has anything to do with it.

Having said that...
If it's "just one external HDD", not bus powered, why don't you just plug it directly into the Mac?
(no hub)

I do have a few small USB-C to USB-A converters. I don't know if a direct connection would be any better (the direct thunderbolt external NVMEs I plugged in—one with my time machine on it—seemed to work fine), but I think I'll try it with a WD drive I have that doesn't have as important of files on it.

I'm trying to decide if it's just an external usb-hub issue or external SATA hard drives in general or if it's Sequoia. I never had these issues with spinning hard drives on Intel Macs. It's just when we upgraded to M-processor Macs and started going Ventura + with OSs.

 

[Fishrrman]

Try a direct connection (no hub).

Try a different enclosure (if you have one).

Try a USB3/SATA docking station (if the drives you have are SATA).

 

[Tincolor]

Not sure if this has been resolved but I had a similar problem with my MacBook Pro M4 Pro and a Orico SATA3.0 dual drive dock. The drives are 20tb barracuda spinning drives. Eventually I was able to mount both drives with no issues but for the first 20 minutes only one drive would mount at a time and trying to eject it would cause Finder to stop responding. Even manually unplugging the drive didn't fix Finder so I had to restart the computer several times. I was switching between my MacBook and an M1 Mac mini to see if there was a difference but the same issue kept happening. I got up to grab a coffee, then replugged everything in and both drives mounted no issue. Not sure what the variable was other than time.

 

[Fishrrman]

tin wrote in reply 8:
"I had a similar problem with my MacBook Pro M4 Pro and a Orico SATA3.0 dual drive dock"

I've never had a "dual" dock.

But I remember reading ... at least when they were a new thing ... that the Mac OS could have trouble with them. Seems that -something- in the USB controller circuitry (or something else?) made it difficult for the Mac OS to distinguish one drive from the other with two drives in the dock.

Might have had something to do with which controller chip was in the dock.
Don't hear much about the problem any more ... but perhaps it can still jump up now and then...