Disk Eject Errors

What is a disk eject error?
When a SoftRAID volume is mounted and a disk disappears or ejects, SoftRAID will notify you of this error.

There are several reasons why this may happen:

1. An enclosure was disconnected, or powered off, when a SoftRAID volume was still mounted.

Troubleshooting:

Most likely this was an inadvertent error as most computer users already know not to disconnect a drive when it is still mounted. Our recommendation is to allow up to two minutes after unmounting all volumes, before powering off or disconnecting an enclosure. This gives the drives time to save the last remaining files (stored in onboard memory) to the disk platters.

Solution:
Be alert to always fully unmount a volume before shutting down.

2. A volume was unmounted, and then powered off or unplugged, however, MacOS did not consider the volume to be completely unmounted. The volume’s disk drives may have still been copying their onboard memory to disk, or an application, often Time Machine, did not fully release the volume.

Troubleshooting:

When a volume is unmounted, it make take a few seconds for all running applications to release the volume. Time Machine, can be a problem here, as in some circumstances, Time Machine keeps resources open on a volume even after it is unmounted. This is a MacOS bug that has mostly been fixed in the current MacOS, but can still occur. Another MacOS process that can cause this is Spotlight, if the indexing process hangs, or the index is damaged.

Solution:
In Time Machine preferences, uncheck “Back up Automatically” and see if this helps prevent this problem.

If this is not a Time Machine volume, go to System Settings/Spotlight and temporarily exempt this volume and restart. Unmount your volume, wait 2 minutes and power it off. Is the problem fixed? If that solves the problem, then you can re-enable Spotlight and Spotlight will create a new index.

3. An event occurred on the host computer, causing an enclosure to momentarily disconnect. On Thunderbolt, which is a “hot swappable” technology, this momentary disconnect causes all disks to be instantly powered down, until the connection is re-established. SoftRAID detects this and puts up a dialog box warning you about the ejects.

Troubleshooting:

This is essentially a electrical noise issue. Every contact point on Thunderbolt has two controller chips, One on the cable end, the other on the enclosure or computer, which communicate with each other. If either chip loses the signal, crashes or resets, it auto-disconnects from the Thunderbolt bus. The disks instantly power down. Generally, they power right back up and your volume remounts on the desktop. This is essentially what causes the disks to eject messages.

Solution:

1. Test all connections and ensure all cables are tightly connected.
2. Make sure no pets are moving the cables, even slightly. ;-)
3. Move the cables to different ports (do this one at a time, so you have an idea what part of the Thunderbolt bus is causing it).
4. You can try a different Thunderbolt cable if you have one.
5. If you have a Thunderbolt Dock, try direct connecting your enclosure for a few days, bypassing the dock.
6. Change Sleep settings

Monterey:

1. Set display sleep to “never” and uncheck “Put drives to sleep”, as they are also involved in this.

Ventura/Sonoma: preventing sleep is a bit more complicated

1. In System Settings, click on Lock Screen. then set Display Sleep to never when plugged in. Then under “Displays” / Advanced, check “Prevent automatic sleeping:. In Energy Saver, uncheck, “Put hard disks to sleep when possible”

Most users never see this problem. It is a flaw in the design of Thunderbolt and can be difficult to troubleshoot.

The more devices you have connected to your computer, the more likely this issue will occur. Even a Thunderbolt monitor can trigger disk ejects in some cases.

Note: Disk ejects like this are very rare with USB. If you have a USB enclosure that keeps ejecting, it is a cable issue, or a failing enclosure.

4. A single disk ejects from the volume. If this is inside the same enclosure as other disks, then it is most likely a disk error or early sign of failure.

Troubleshooting:

This discussion applies when a disk ejects, then shows up again in a short while.

Rotating Media:
When only one disk, in a multi drive enclosure, such as a Thunderbay, ejects, this is a hardware issue, with either the drive, or that specific slot in the enclosure. (its possible for 2 disks to eject, with this same issue, if they are “next to each other”.)

Assuming SoftRAID does not show any SMART predicted failure concerns, then you need to isolate the problem from being an enclosure issue, or a disk drive issue.

To Troubleshoot:

1. Launch SoftRAID.
2. Identify the disk that is ejecting. You can open the SoftRAID log, which will show in many cases, the SoftRAID ID of the disk that is ejecting.
3. If you cannot identify the disk:
4. Give each disk a SoftRAID disk label. When this happens again, the SoftRAID log should show the label for the disk that is ejecting.
5. In your enclosure, you want to move the ejecting disk to another slot. Avoid using the slot next to the current location.

Example: in a 4 drive enclosure, if the disk ejecting is in slot C or D, you can swap it with a disk in A or B, not D. If it is in A or B, then swap it with a disk in C or D. This is important as an enclosure has 2 trays that share the same PCI bus. You want to isolate the problem from being an enclosure problem.

If you swap drive location and the same disk errors, replace the drive.

If you swap the drive location and the new disk in the same slot ejects, then the enclosure is failing.

NVMe or SSD drives:

One difference with flash media is they can sometimes “hang” from a early failure mode, or from heat. However, if this is the case, they do not immediately reset and show up in SoftRAID. A Flash media drive that ejects, if in a stable enclosure, should be replaced.