Endless “Disk not ejected properly” popups
On January 1st I woke up my Mac Mini M1 from its sleep and I had hundreds of popups saying “Disk not ejected properly”. I had left my external USB-C Lacie Rugged HDD 5 TB drive plugged in, and something had gone horribly wrong.
The first annoying thing is getting rid of the popups. I think there was a popup every 2 minutes. During 12 hours, that’s 360 popups 😣 Because they are system notifications, they are not grouped into a single app, so you can’t batch-dismiss them. After some search, I found this magic CLI command to get rid of them all:
killall NotificationCenter
But that didn’t make the problem go away.
How to reproduce
If you search for that message, you will find people with tons of different problems. If you call Apple support, they’ll make you go through several standard procedures, but you will need some test case to verify that it works. In my case, the issue can be 100% reproduced with the following:
- Plug the USB-C HDD to the USB-C port of the Mac (any of the ports)
- Make sure the drive works by reading a file in it.
- Go to the Apple menu and set the Mac to Sleep.
- Wait 4 minutes.
- Make sure the drive turns off (I touch it to make sure it stopped spinning)
- Wake up the Mac. At that point, I get one “Disk not ejected properly” popup.
You will need some patience to do tests, but it’s important to have a test case that you can reproduce every time.
Things can get worse
I ignored the issue because it only happened when the computer went to sleep, so I would disconnect the drive when I finished work. In 2020 I had a similar issue, but at the time I solved it by disabling “Put disks to sleep whenever possible” in the macOS power settings. But that option didn’t help this time.
But one day things got worse: I got “Disk not ejected properly” every 2 minutes even while I was working with the disk and the computer was awake. At that point, I called Apple Support (chatted twice, called twice).
Troubleshooting with Apple Support
Unplugging and plugging the drive again didn’t fix the continuous disconnections. After running First Aid on the drive and verifying it’s fine, the Apple support team told me to start the Mac in safe mode, and restart again. That fixed the most pressing problem of the drive disconnecting every 2 minutes, but the issue of the drive disconnecting when the computer goes to sleep persisted.
The other thing they will tell you to do is to create a test admin user and try from that account. The issue persisted for me.
Apple support suspected the cable and the disk, but I wasn’t totally convinced, because why would restarting the Mac fix the most pressing issue, the ejections every 2 minutes? A few weeks later after that first call with Apple, I got that same problem again and I fixed it with a restart. Why unplugging & plugging the drive doesn’t fix it, but a computer restart does? I did suspect the driver, or my Mac (spoiler: I was wrong).
Anyway, let’s remember that the issue wasn’t totally fixed with a restart because when the Mac went to sleep it still caused the abrupt disconnection of the drive.
Seagate (lack of) customer support
Because the Apple engineer suspected the cable that came with my LaCie disk, I tried to contact LaCie. LaCie support is now part of Seagate support. They have a chatbot, and eventually you can chat with a person (or perhaps it wasn’t?) I pasted all my notes to an agent and I got this: “I understand that you are having issue while connecting to computer. Am I correct?” 😅 Didn’t I give enough detail?
After 30 minutes, the only thing I got was a suggestion to run First Aid. I can use Google and ChatGPT, thanks for nothing 😑 They also let me know that they don’t offer support by email to individual users… (In 2017 I had a similar issue with another of their drives, and I did all the interactions by email at the time.)
Battery of tests
I’m going to list down all the things I did to try to isolate the problem. Remember I didn’t know yet what caused it.
- Connect the HDD to the Mac mini USB-A port with a USB-C to USB-A cable (the one that comes with the PS5 controller). I left the drive plugged all night and it worked perfectly, so one would think that the drive is fine.
- Connect the HDD with that USB-C to USB-A cable to a Macbook Pro with macOS Catalina. It works perfectly. Unfortunately that Mac doesn’t have a USB-C port so I can’t test the other cable.
- Connect the HDD to the Mac mini USB-C port with a USB-C cable from an Android phone. With that cable, I don’t get alerts saying that it got disconnected, but all of a sudden the files can’t be read. It seems more dangerous, because it appears connected, but actually the files don’t work. I got “The file xxx could not be opened” when I tried to read any file, and I got some corrupt files while I was writing to the drive. So it’s not really working and it’s super dangerous ⚠️
- Update from macOS Sonoma 14.2.1 to 14.3. It didn’t fix the issue.
- I tried plugging the HDD with the USB-C to USB-A adapter with a USB hub connected to the USB-C port and the drive didn't turn on! I remember it working at some point in the past… Any other device works, though, so perhaps there's not enough power for this drive?
After these tests, I headed to the Apple Store and I did more tests with an engineer at the Genius Bar:
- Using the LaCie USB-C cable, we connected the HDD to one of their Macs, a Macbook Air M2 running Sonoma 14.1.2. Doing the sleep test, the issue reproduced. So it seems unrelated to my Mac mini. It’s either the cable, the disk, or the drivers.
- Using a Thunderbolt 4 data cable (£75) the error happened again 😞 So it wasn’t a problem exclusive to my cable.
- Using a 2m Apple 240W thunderbolt charge cable (£29) the error DOES NOT happen 🎊
But why? The more expensive data cable says it’s 100W, so it seemed to be related to the power. For the time being, I got the thunderbolt charge cable. I left it plugged all night and it was working correctly. But I wanted to know what was going on. And did I really want to use that cable? (It turns out that that cable wasn’t ideal.)
Handshaking in a 3rd call with Apple
I called Apple support again. The engineer explained that when you connect the drive to the computer, there’s a handshake that determines whether to use Thunderbolt, or regular USB-C. Even if the port looks the same, Thunderbolt and USB-C are actually different connections. The Mac must think it’s thunderbolt even if I use a regular USB-C cable. And then it’s when it becomes unstable. When it goes to sleep, it tries to keep a register of the connection so it doesn’t have to do another handshake, or spark a new connection again. Then, when it wakes up it sends data as it was Thunderbolt, when it’s not.
That’s the explanation I got and I was suggested to keep using the 240W thunderbolt charge cable. That doesn’t seem to explain why it didn’t work with the Thunderbolt 4 cable, though.
Apple told me to speak to the manufacturer.
Speed tests with Seagate support
I explained the whole thing to Seagate customer support again, and I got this reply:
“Upon checking the issue is from cable not from drive. According to your statement, you have tried with different PC and different cable. You will get the pop up like disk not ejected properly except this 240W thunderbolt charge cable. Kindly use your drive with 240W thunderbolt charge cable. Unfortunately your drive is supported only with this cable - 240W thunderbolt cable.”
I asked why do they sell the drive with a cable that doesn’t work, then, but I got no reply.
The chat is quite surreal and sometimes I wonder whether I am speaking to a human. Except if it were ChatGPT the grammar would be correct, so I do believe they are human. After 1 hour 40 minutes in the chat, I managed to speak to a more helpful person who asked me to do some speed tests.
If you are doing this, I recommend using a big file to get consistent results. I zipped my local Movies folder, and that gave me a 1GB ZIP file. To test the copying speed from the Mac mini SSD drive to the external drive, I used rsync. You can use it like this (“LaCie 5TB” is the name of my HDD):
rsync -ah --progress ~/Movies.zip /Volumes/LaCie\ 5TB
I tried with the Apple cable I got in the Apple store, and with the original LaCie cable:
- With 240W thunderbolt charge cable: 36.87 Mbytes/sec
- With USB-C to USB-A adapter cable (for reference): 38.21 Mbytes/sec
- With USB-C cable from LaCie: 123.62 Mbytes/sec
So it’s much slower with the charge cable, as slow as using USB-A 😢 But I couldn’t reliably use the LaCie cable. Or the £75 Thunderbolt 4 data transfer cable. Seagate says the drive is compatible with both Thunderbolt 4 and USB-C. The Mac Mini M1 port is Thunderbolt 3. Seagate escalated this issue and they told me to wait 24 hours.
Perhaps the HDD was needing more power than it should and that’s why it wants the 240W cable? Or perhaps the operating system/driver doesn’t know how much power it needs to give to the HDD? Shouldn’t the driver somehow detect this? And the macOS UI certainly could have a better way to close those 360 popups…
In the Seagate help page on this issue they say many users have reported this “after updating the macOS”, so I thought perhaps it could be Sonoma-related. Read “Disk not ejected properly on Mac”.
I decided to speak again with Apple Support.
4th call with Apple Support: USB 2.0 & HFS+
In this last call with Apple I shared my screen and they helped me troubleshoot and install some things:
- We installed the LaCie tool kit to see if they provide firmware updates, but there aren’t any. See LaCie Downloads and Firmware downloads.
- They recommended me to use the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app for testing the disk speed.
- They asked me to format the drive again with GUID Partition Map, and HFS+ (Mac OS Extended, Journaled), with the Disk Utility in macOS Sonoma. I was using APFS, but that’s only recommended for SSD drives, and there is no advantage using it in HDD drives.
We didn’t manage to fix the problem, but I got faster transfers after the formatting. I was getting about 85 Mbytes/sec with APFS (using the Disk Speed Test app; my rsync test was faster), but something around 130 Mbytes/sec with HFS+. See below.
The other thing I learned is that the 240W charging cable is USB 2.0, not USB 3.0. That’s why it’s slower. In contrast, the Thunderbolt 4 data cable supports USB 3.0 up to 10 Gbits/second, and it also supports USB 4.0, which it’s 40 Gbits/sec.
So the drive worked when I used USB 2.0, in either the USB-A or the USB-C port, but started failing otherwise. I had to speak to Seagate again.
Drive Replacement
After another support chat session with Seagate, they told me there must be something wrong with the drive. Since it was still under the 2-year warranty, they asked me to send it back to them, to an address in the UK (tracked, about £8 in the UK).
A week later I got a new drive.
I did all the tests several times. I also left the computer sleeping for 30 minutes to be really sure. The problem was gone 🥳
Just some notes, in case someone uses the same drive:
- I ran the LaCie Setup that comes preinstalled in the drive, and the drive got formatted with GUID Partition Map and HFS+, which matches Apple's suggestion 👍
- The Setup app redirects you to lyvetst.seagate.com/?sn=… to register the drive, but that URL does not exist. I edited the link to point to lyveint.seagate.com instead, and that worked.
- Disk Speed Test says the speed is: Write 141.2 MB/s, Read 135.5 MB/s 👍
Happy drive now 🥳
Summary
Debugging hardware issues is really a pain. Sometimes it’s easier to live with the faulty drive than trying to get to the bottom of it.
However, I must say that Apple support was very helpful and that I learned lots of things in the process. I can’t say the same from Seagate, because we still haven’t learned what piece of their hardware would cause such a strange behaviour. They sent me a working refurbished drive in the end, but I spent a lot of time and some money to resolve an issue that it was their fault to begin with.
In any case, I hope this article helps other people struggling with the infamous “Disk not ejected properly” troubleshoot the issue and figure out whether it’s a problem caused by the drive itself or not.
Thank you very much to the people in Apple support and Seagate support that gave me all the information I’ve mentioned in this article.
References
- How do dismiss many “disk not ejected properly” notifications: Apple StackExchange
- If you see “disk not ejected properly” on your Mac Pro (2023) (August 21, 2023). (Not Mac mini!). They also say “Apple is aware of this issue and a resolution is planned for a future macOS update.”
- Disk Not Ejected Properly On Mac Seagate help article.
- Disk Not Ejected Properly thread on Apple developers forums (I posted some of this information there)
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