I have a 2021 MacBook Pro running the latest OS version on M1 Max silicon. I have two 6TB external drives (neither are SSDs) one by Seagate and one WD MyBook. I’m running (as of the date of this post), the latest versions of WD Utilities as well as firmware for both drives.
The MBP power management is set to automatic and the put hard drives to sleep option is set to never. The laptop runs on charger power and never on batteries.
The Seagate drive works as expected and doesn’t give me any problems. The WD drive however will randomly not be readable after the laptop has woken from sleep.
- In WD Discovery, the disk shows in the list of connected drives but doesn’t show the available capacity. I also can’t eject it from there.
- In Finder, I can see the drive and the first level of files and folders in the drive, but I can’t open or interact with them in any way. I cant eject the disk normally from Finder, but I can force eject it.
- In Diskutil the drive shows up in the list, but can’t be ejected, unmounted or have any other operations run on it (the operations just time out).
To get the drive to work again, I need to unplug it (either from the power supply or the laptop) and then plug it in again. I get yelled at by MacOS for not ejecting it, but then the drive is recognised and can be used again.
I have:
- Run all levels of the WD Diagnose utility on the drive. No problems were found.
- Run diskutil verify and repair and discovered no problems.
- Checked the latest firmware, WD Utilities versions and OS updates. All are current.
- Changed the USB cable used to connect to the laptop. No difference.
- Tried it connected directly to the laptop (originally it was connected via a dock). No difference.
What might be causing this, and how could I fix it? I use the drive as my onsite backup which is synced to a cloud backup service (Backblaze), so the drive just randomly not being readable is a big problem.
