Why does SoftRAID eject drives when my Mac goes to sleep?

SoftRAID does not eject drives — it detects and reports when drives have become unavailable and alerts you so you can take action before data loss occurs. If you are seeing ejection alerts around sleep, there are two distinct causes, and they have different solutions.

Is it drive sleep, or a Thunderbolt ejection?

Drive sleep happens when macOS spins down your drives to conserve power. This is not an ejection — the drives are still connected but have gone idle. When macOS tries to access them again, there may be a delay, a volume access error, or in some cases an unmount. Drive sleep is controlled entirely by macOS; SoftRAID has no ability to override it.

A Thunderbolt ejection is different. Thunderbolt is a hot-swap bus, meaning any momentary loss of signal — even for a fraction of a second — causes all drives on that bus to instantly power off. This can happen during a sleep/wake transition if there is any signal instability on the Thunderbolt connection. The drives disappear from macOS entirely, and SoftRAID alerts you that they have been ejected.

The simplest way to tell the difference: if your drives reappear on their own shortly after waking your Mac, it is likely a Thunderbolt ejection event. If your drives are still present but slow to respond after waking, drive sleep is the more likely cause.

What to do

For drive sleep issues – Why do my drives keep going to sleep and how do I prevent it?

For Thunderbolt ejection issues – My disks are ejected while in use. What can I do?

A note on USB

USB does not have Thunderbolt’s instant power-off behavior. If you are using a USB enclosure and seeing ejections, this almost always indicates a faulty cable or a failing enclosure — not a sleep-related issue.