So I fell in love with the new 1TB SSD Passport and bought a 2nd one of which they both operated nicely on my MacBook dock until suddenly they didn’t.
With my first SSD I would notice that once or twice, within the last few days, the SSD would unmount itself suddenly and my Mac would pop up this window saying that The Disk was not ejected properly. I rebooted the Mac and the SSD was still not mounted and this was when I thought that the software Discovery was hindering the USB mounting, so I uninstalled Discovery and finally the SSD reappeared. After that, I didn’t really have any problems with the SSD unmounting until I bought a second SSD.
With the second SSD, it took hours to copy over 315,000 files but it did complete successfully and it had no problems until much later in the night.
While working with the computer tonight, the second SSD suddenly unmounted itself and the Mac gave me the pop up window indicating that the SSD was not ejected properly. Even pulling the cable and replugging it in, the SSD did not re-appear. Of course with all this jiggling of cables on the dock, my first SSD got unmounted too and that too I could not get remounted even with unplugging the cable and replugging the cables.
I then spent the next two hours trying to get both SSD remounted,
- swapping cables between the two drives thinking that the second drive had bad cables.
- replugging the units back in multiple times
- rebooting the mac with and without the SSD’s plugged in,
- re-install discovery in hopes that somehow the drives would be discovered.
- I even tried using the update firmware for Passport drives but the app told me that the drives were locked (they were not locked). They are as-is formatted as ExFat with Pargon NTFS software on my Mac.
- tried mounting the drives using the disk utility as I can see them (unmounted) but they just won’t mount
- Took the mac off the dock and plugged it in straight as USB-C, individually. Not mounting. (they did mount before this problem under USB-C).
- tried another USB drive to make sure that my Mac or dock isn’t USB broken and the other USB drive mounted without problems.
- Neither the Discovery App nor the Mac Disk Utility App would mount the SSD.
then I tried mounting under Paragon NTFS app and the wheel would spin forever (5 minutes) and suddenly one of the SSD got mounted. I also did the same for the other SSD and eventually it too got mounted.
Perhaps it is the Paragon NTFS software that is causing this problem? but I’m not sure if it is a hardware problem or software since both SSD has exhibited the sudden un-mounting of the disk without the cables being jiggled (the MacBook is sitting in its cradle).
Paragon NTFS app is the only software that would actually mount the drives. Neither Discovery nor disk Utility would mount the drives.
Currently both SSD drives are mounted and seems to be stable but this last two hours of troubleshooting has been disconcerting.
correction: one of my SSD just got Disconnected with the message popping up Disk Not ejected properly. Trying to remount the SSD under Paragon and the spinning disc is still spinning (a few minutes now). It took about 5 minutes before the SSD got remounted.
addendum: the 2nd SSD unmounted itself right in the middle of a 10GB copy and now it won’t mount at all. In fact it would disappear from the paragon list of drives when attempting to mount, then re-appear on the list a few seconds later. I also notice that the device is hot to the touch. The first SSD is only warm. I think it could be a heat problem.