Mission Critical: The Mysterious Case of the Improper Disk Ejections on TBT4-UDZ with M2 Mac mini

[markrez]

Urgent Help Needed: Mac mini & TBT4-UDZ Caught in an Ejecting Dilemma

Greetings fellow tech enthusiasts,

In a world where technology and data reign supreme, I have stumbled upon a perplexing and possibly devastating issue with my Plugable TBT4-UDZ docking station and Mac mini (M2). It appears that an invisible force is haunting my system, causing relentless **
** disk ejections when I least expect it (when I’m away from the Mac).

System details:

• Mac mini (M2)
• macOS Ventura 13.3.1

Time is of the essence, as every moment that passes with this unresolved issue could bring potential doom to my drives. I have tirelessly tried to counteract this sinister force by disabling all energy-saving options in my system settings, but alas, my efforts have been in vain.

My fellow comrades, I beseech you to lend me your wisdom and expertise in this dire situation. Have any of you encountered this treacherous problem, or have you perhaps discovered the key to vanquishing it once and for all?

Your guidance in this mission is invaluable, and I eagerly await any advice or suggestions you may offer. Together, we can conquer this technological enigma and ensure the safety of our precious data.

Godspeed!

[markrez]

Now this is getting annoying. I have an encrypted time machine disk plugged into the TBT4-UDZ and it asks for a password every time it disconnects (and there’s no way to cancel out of the dialog box). My wireless mouse, which transmitter is plugged in to the TBT4-UDZ stopped working until I turn it off and on again.

Are there settings in the Mac I can change?
Is there firmware I can update on the TBT4-UDZ?

[Joshua_H]

Hello Mark,

Thank you for contacting Plugable support! Sorry to hear about this issue with these disconnecting drives and also the wireless mouse issues. I’d be more than happy to assist you.

To get started I have a few questions to help me better understand the big picture:

1. Are all of your external USB storage devices that are attached to the dock affected, or just some of them? If it’s just some devices but not all, I’d be quite curious to know what brand and models are affected.

2. Does the USB port being used seem to matter? I ask because the TBT4-UDZ has a mix of USB 10Gbps and 5Gbps ports. I have seen in a few instances where some devices may prefer one or the other, although not terribly common.

3. Since you’ve disabled all of the macOS power savings settings, when you come back to your Mac and this has happened may I assume the Mac is just running but idle and hasn’t attempted to sleep/wake during this time?

4. Have you observed any USB storage dropping offline while you’re actively using the system?

5. For the mouse issue, I’d be curious to know brand/model for this as well. And to clarify - you mentioned it stops working until you turn it off and on again, by this do you mean turning the dock off/on, or the wireless mouse has to be turned off/on to resolve that behavior?

6. Do the disconnecting drives and mouse issues typically happen at the same time, or will they happen separately of each other?

7. Finally, can you confirm the TBT4-UDZ is being connected using the provided Thunderbolt 4 cable it shipped with?

Please don’t hesitate to let us know of other questions.

Thanks again for contacting Plugable support and best wishes!

Joshua Henry
Senior Engineer | Product Owner
Plugable Technologies

[markrez]

Are all of your external USB storage devices that are attached to the dock affected, or just some of them? If it’s just some devices but not all, I’d be quite curious to know what brand and models are affected.

Yes, it seems to happen to ALL the drives

Does the USB port being used seem to matter? I ask because the TBT4-UDZ has a mix of USB 10Gbps and 5Gbps ports. I have seen in a few instances where some devices may prefer one or the other, although not terribly common.

I keep the drives in the 10G ports only

Since you’ve disabled all of the macOS power savings settings, when you come back to your Mac and this has happened may I assume the Mac is just running but idle and hasn’t attempted to sleep/wake during this time?

Yes, the screen is just shut off

Have you observed any USB storage dropping offline while you’re actively using the system?

No, this only happens when I’m away

For the mouse issue, I’d be curious to know brand/model for this as well. And to clarify - you mentioned it stops working until you turn it off and on again, by this do you mean turning the dock off/on, or the wireless mouse has to be turned off/on to resolve that behavior?

It’s a logitech MX Vertical, I have the wireless dongle plugged into the front 2.0 port. I had to turn off the TBT4, turning off the mouse did not work (though in retrospect I should have tried to unplug the dongle to see if that would have worked).

Do the disconnecting drives and mouse issues typically happen at the same time, or will they happen separately of each other?

Mouse has only happened once and I’m unsure if the drives happen at the same time since I’m never at my Mac when it happens.

Finally, can you confirm the TBT4-UDZ is being connected using the provided Thunderbolt 4 cable it shipped with?

Yes, I’m using the cable that was provided. That said, I would love to find a replacement right-angle cable since it HAS to be plugged in to the front of the TBT4-UDZ but plugged into the back of the Mac.

[markrez]

Update for this morning

Of the Five disks plugged in only these two were given the message upon logging in for the first time after it slept overnight:
USB 10G Front = “TimeMachine”
USB C Back = “Production 500GB”

The others that weren’t effected were plugged in to the the 10G and 5G USB ports on back. I’ve moved “TimeMachine” to the open 5GB port in the back.

[Joshua_H]

Hello Mark, and thanks for all of that information along with the update today.

At the moment I am uncertain what is causing these behaviors. Based on what we know of how everything is setup I would not expect for the drives to be dropping offline.

I was able to do some testing on an Apple Silicon based Mac running with the TBT4-UDZ and various USB storage devices attached to both front and rear 5Gbps and 10Gbps ports. Letting that system sit idle for several hours (without sleeping, but the display was off), and letting it sleep overnight to then wake it this morning showed all of my drives still attached.

I have my Mac set to not sleep when the display is off, and I have it set to not put attached drives to sleep. If I manually sleep the Mac, I’ve also set it so that Power Nap is disabled.

We may need to try sending you a replacement dock that we’ve pretested to ensure it’s known-good. This could help us narrow down if the dock you have now is defective in some way.

If you are interested in trying a pretested replacement dock under warranty please let me know. I will then email you directly for some additional information.

Thanks again,
Josh

[markrez]

Yes, I think I would, as the one I have is sporadic with when it decides to have eject issues.
I left for some meetings today and came back to three eject errors.

[markrez]

So I got the new device and put it in place. (Thank you for sending that by the way.)

Buuuuuuuut…
Left for a networking event and came back to this:

Not very promising.

Are there other settings we can try?

[Joshua_H]

Hello Mark,

I’m glad the replacement arrived but I’m sorry to hear that the issues remain. We can at least rule out the original dock being defective, and assuming that the Thunderbolt cable and power adapter were swapped out too then we should also know these are not defective either causing issue. But it would appear this model dock is having compatibility/stability issues with your Mac Mini.

At this moment I am unfortunately not sure what to recommend as our next steps given what has already been tried. The main causes that we generally see for drive related issues on Macs with docks or hubs should already be ruled out. To recap:

• You already had disabled power settings (such as not allowing the system to sleep when the display is off and not allowing the drives to sleep, etc) prior to reporting this issue to us. Unfortunately there was no improvement.
• You have tried various ports and the problem appears to occur across any port and any drive (like with the TimeMachine drive you moved from one of the 10G ports to a 5G on the back).
• We have tried sending a replacement that at least for us appeared to be stable with external storage attached but with ultimately no improvements for you.

I have been researching other possible options and looking for anything that may be relevant. I haven’t been able to find any conclusive information, but this “Disk Not Ejected Properly” issue can be caused by many variables and there is a lot of noise since this error apparently quite common.

I have seen a few reports now where some users experienced drives ejecting with similar behavior to what you’re seeing, although they were not even using a dock. However, I’ve seen some mentions that by moving the device to a different Thunderbolt port on the back of the Mini that this helped. I’m not sure if you’re already tried this, but it might be worthwhile to try the dock in different Thunderbolt ports on the Mini.

A possible workaround for this problem, several users suggested using an application that automatically will eject and mount attached USB storage depending on the system state. So for example it could be set to eject drives properly whenever the display is turned off. They should then mount again when resuming computer use. While this is not exactly ideal considering you have an encrypted drive (and thus have to enter your password) it would prevent any data loss from occurring from the drives ejecting improperly. Note that I have not tested this app personally yet, however, the community feedback seems quite positive.

https://ejectify.app
“Ejectify automatically unmounts external disks when your Mac starts sleeping and mounts them again after it wakes up.”

Otherwise in the meantime I will continue to research for any other possible fixes for this behavior, but I also understand if this issue is not something you can continue to suffer through. Worst case scenario we can of course help to offer a return for a full refund.

Thank you,
Josh