Most or all folders disapperar in WD external drive

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

HI

Maybe somebody has met this problem.

I have a WD My passport 4 tb formatted to APFS. Product Number WDBBYF10040BBK-0A

It is connected to a Macbook Pro 13" mid 2012 with MacOS Catalina.

Quite often, I will connect the external drive and then the folders will all show up. Then in a few hours, when you look at the folders again, almost all if not all folders disappears. Then when I try to eject it, it will say it needs to be force ejected.

After force ejecting and reconnecting it again, all folders show up again.

Can anyone tell me what is going on?

best regards

Ansj64

1 Like
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What filesystem is your external hard drive formatted with? I would suggest you copy all the data from an external hard drive to your Mac. Once the backup is taken go to Disk Utility and repair the drive. After disk repair, see if the problem is fixed. Otherwise, erase the drive again with MacOS Journaled, APFS, or exFAT (if you want platform independence)

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It was formatted with APFS.

That’s kind of the plan next if I can’t find the cause.

Thanks

4

Just FYI. I have installed WD Utilities. It somehow tries to recognize the hard drive and once in a while it will do some background process. But I think that’s the reason why folders disappear.

Once I removed all WD related apps, the disappearing folders seems to not happen anymore.

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The WD My Passport 4TB is a mechanical HDD (Hard Disk Drive). However, APFS is designed specifically for solid-state drives (SSDs). Using APFS on a traditional mechanical HDD like your WD My Passport can lead to disk fragmentation and reduced benchmark performance; over time, it is also highly prone to a bug where the “file index is lost” when waking the drive from sleep. I recommend reformatting the drive to HFS+, a format better suited for HDDs.

  1. Temporarily back up all important data from the drive to your Mac’s local storage or another secure location.
  2. Open Disk Utility on your Mac. Click the “View” button in the top-left corner and select “Show All Devices.”
  3. Select the top-level root directory of the WD drive (not the partition listed underneath it).
  4. Click “Erase.” For the scheme, select “GUID Partition Map.” For the format, select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” (i.e., the HFS+ format).
    Once formatting is complete, copy your data back onto the drive.
    Check out this blog for more tips: How to Format an External Hard Drive on Mac?