I’ve had the above error message on and off since getting my M1 MBP. I do have loads of peripherals attached through daisy-chained Anker powered hubs which would seem to be a source of endless drama. But I eventually sorted it all out after I replaced a single cable and the message disappeared… until I attached a monitor via HDMI. Now the error messages are back, and in spades. This happens every time on wake-up, and no, none of the settings have been changed. I unplugged the HDMI monitor, and of course the messages persist. Sometimes one, sometimes all attached drives get the dreaded “disk not ejected properly” messages whether I’m using the MBP monitor, the HMDI attached monitor, or both. FWIW, they’re all going to the Mac via a single USB3 to Thunderbolt/USBC cable.
I still have mostly USBA peripherals, so I have to keep the USBA hubs. Although I’d rather not see the messages and have to close them every time I wake up the MBP, I guess I can live with it as long as there is no possible data problem with all my drives. Thoughts?
I had until recently been using an OWC USB-C dock (the desktop one with Ethernet, DisplayPort, etc). Periodically when I would, say, unplug my headset from the front USB port, my Mac would complain I hadn’t properly ejected the drives that were plugged in the back. I never figured out if I was just bumping things, but I really don’t think so as the USB-C cables were pretty solidly connected.
This happened to me when I was trying to draw too much power from my hub. The culprit in my case was a Stream Deck and when I hooked that up to my Studio Display instead of the hub the errors stopped. It was because there was not enough power to keep drives mounted, despite it being a powered hub.
That’s interesting, as I had not considered overdraw since both of my daisy-chained hubs are powered, and most of the attached peripherals are also powered.The bus-powered items are two portable SSDs and two portable HDDs and a Blu-Ray drive that uses two ports for extra juice I suppose. Anything else, including bigger HDDs have their own power supplies. Ethernet is also connected via the hub.
Yes it sounds “overloaded” but it was working fine apparently until I attached a monitor via HDMI. The possible culprit could be the Blu-ray drive, but that very rarely runs.
Sure, a Synology type solution could certainly clean up the JBOD arrangement, but with two kids having just gotten braces yesterday and a budding entrepreneurial venture draining the bank account, additional computer toys are nowhere near the budget at the moment. I’ve got to try to figure this out on the cheap.
There’s a potential of data on these drives being corrupted if data is being written as it loses power. How likely this is, I don’t know but it is possible.
Is it possible to power the drives separately or split them over multiple powered UBS hubs?
In the end, it sounds like you’re running quite a complex setup that you’d need to spend some money to simplify and derisk yourself.
My single hub was powered, too. I always put it down to a glitch in the hub, or in its interactions with the Mac. At one stage I was having issues with drives and OWC told me to install their disk ejector tool because it “better managed” the drives or some such.
OWC Dock Ejector allows you to eject all volumes attached through an OWC or Akitio brand dock. This application only ejects volumes attached through an OWC or Akitio brand dock. It will not eject volumes connected directly to the computer, network volumes, or volumes attached to a different brand dock. It also does not eject volumes that come from disk image files.