I have 3 western digital drives that are not that old and when connecting them to my 2020 intel MacBook Air they randomly disconnect constantly when trying to copy files from the disk. Just wondering if this is a common problem because it seemed like it happened to all three of my drives at once. several terabytes of data I can't get off the drives because it keeps disconnecting the drive randomly.
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western digital drives failing
- Thread starter Acorn
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What operating system are you on? When I upgraded from Big Sur to Monterey (also on an Intel Air) all my Western Digital external drives stopped working. They would randomly unmount making them unusable.
I tested them out on a different Mac running an older OS and they still worked fine. Annoyingly, as a result I had to do a major roll back to Big Sur (basically a factory reset as you can't go back as easily as forwards with OS) and guess what? The drives all started working absolutely fine again.
I won't be upgrading again from Big Sur. I posted in another thread about this as there were some other people having drive problems on Monterey, but the number of people affected seems small. It may well be a specific bug related to Monterey and these drives. It's also stopped me buying a new M1/M2 Air because I can't afford to do that and also change all my external drives in case they don't work.
My Samsung T7 SSD was not affected, for general info.
I tested them out on a different Mac running an older OS and they still worked fine. Annoyingly, as a result I had to do a major roll back to Big Sur (basically a factory reset as you can't go back as easily as forwards with OS) and guess what? The drives all started working absolutely fine again.
I won't be upgrading again from Big Sur. I posted in another thread about this as there were some other people having drive problems on Monterey, but the number of people affected seems small. It may well be a specific bug related to Monterey and these drives. It's also stopped me buying a new M1/M2 Air because I can't afford to do that and also change all my external drives in case they don't work.
My Samsung T7 SSD was not affected, for general info.
Please try this - connect the drives. Open a terminal window and type (copy paste from here)
press return. you will asked for your password. type it and press enter. Check wether the sudden dismounts on USB persist.
sudo killall -STOP -c usbdpress return. you will asked for your password. type it and press enter. Check wether the sudden dismounts on USB persist.
yes I am on Monterey. I may roll back if the issue will go away. Its a lot of data to recover. Over 8 TB. Im not that familiar with terminal. what does that do
The command stops the usb demon. Alternatively you can use the Activity Monitor to do the same.
well I connected one of the usb drives that was constant disconnecting and "disappearing" and connected it to a windows laptop. I installed hsf+ paragon software trial and was able to copy 100 gigs without the drive disconnecting. whatever the issue is its with Monterey and not the drive because on a windows system the drive works perfect.