rscheffler
Offline
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 Help - macOS 14 Sonoma - frequent external disk disconnections | |
UPDATE July 3: Switching the WD SN850X NVMe from a Sabrent USB-C enclosure to an Acasis TBU405 M1 enclosure and connecting it with a TB4 cable has resolved the drive disconnection problems explained below. Still don't know what specifically caused the drive disconnects and it still happens with my other WD SN850X drives in other copies of the same Sabrent USB-C enclosure. I ordered another TBU405 M1 and will probably get more. And yes the 3x faster file transfer speed is nice, too. 
Thanks to everyone who helped troubleshoot this problem!
P.S. if ordered directly from Acasis they currently offer a $15 coupon for that enclosure, which drops it below $70 US.
----------------------------------------------
After reading about considerably improved Adobe Enhance/Denoise speed in Lightroom because it's now finally using Apple's Neural Engines in M1/2/3 Macs with recent versions of OS 14 Sonoma, I updated my MBP 14" M1 Pro from 12.x to 14.5 a couple days ago.
And as promised, Denoise batching time was cut in half, so I was happy. And I immediately did an overnight 1100 image batch from files on an external 4TB NVME connected over USB 3.
But in the last day or so when running further Denoise batches, the system has had frequent external disk disconnects after ~30 or fewer files on the external disk have gone through Denoise. My system is M1 Pro, 10 core, 1TB 16GB. Because of the 1TB storage limitation, along with other reasons, I often edit/process larger projects on external NVME SSDs connected over USB (not TB) at 10Gb/s. All of my NVMEs are WD SN850X models. Two are 2TB and one is 4TB. I primarily use the 4TB. These are all in identical $30 Sabrent USB-C enclosures.
At first I thought maybe a bad cable or enclosure, so I swapped the cables and enclosures but the disconnects continued. I tried a 15" MBA M2 running macOS 14.4.1 copying 800GB from the problematic 4TB drive to one of the 2TBs via Carbon Copy Cloner. But the 2TB drive receiving the files disconnected several times during that copy process while the previously problematic 4TB drive never disconnected.
A quick online search revealed many similar complaints about external NVME SSDs disconnecting after updating to Sonoma. Troublingly, many of these complaints are many months old and early in the Sonoma release cycle. There were suggested solutions such as disabling disk sleep in System Settings. Mine was already disabled because that has been my default going back many OS versions. One potential solution was to install the Amphetamine app and use its Drive Alive feature to keep external drives constantly awake (while the OS was set to never let the disks sleep, apparently some enclosures override this, which the Drive Alive feature would circumvent). But that also did not resolve the disconnects.
It appears the disconnects happen during frequent or sustained writes to the external drive. Conversely, when reading files off the drive, such as opening a contact sheet of ~5000 images in Photo Mechanic and culling/tagging, or when the drive is the source when transferring a large batch to another drive via CCC, no disconnects happen.
I started to wonder if it was a thermal problem - the drive becoming too warm and the controller disconnecting it from the computer. While the NVME enclosures were on the warm side, they weren't warmer than in the past. But just in case it was some form of thermal throttling, I put an ice pack on the 4TB NVME, which brought the enclosure's temperature way down to about body temperature. But the disconnects continued. I suspected a connection to temperature because if I let the drive sit idle but connected to the computer for 30 minutes, Lightroom Denoise would process about 30-40 images before the drive would disconnect again. If Denoise was immediately resumed, it would do maybe another 8-10 files before the drive disconnected. And if Denise was again immediately resumed, it would only do 1-2 more files before the drive would disconnect.
Anyone with similar experiences and hopefully solutions?
|
