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External SSD drives corrupted and fail with Big Sur

Is anyone else having problems with external SSD drives and Big Sur? I have had a WD Passport SSD connected to my 2019 MacBook Pro 15 for over a year with no issues. When MacOS 11.1 was released I decided it was time to upgrade from Catalina. It didn’t take long running Big Sur before my SSD was corrupted. I reformatted it and it happened again several more times. Plus MacOS is crashing regularly. There is a thread on the Sandisk forum about this issue. My Passport SSD drive tests as clean. I have a backup on Time Machine but any attempt to restore from Time Machine results in a MacOS crash. The drive is connected directly to a Thunderbolt port so no hub is involved to confuse the issue.


I am thinking it is time to revert to Catalina as it appears Apple screwed this one up pretty bad.

Posted on Dec 16, 2020 10:07 PM

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Posted on Dec 23, 2020 6:38 AM

I had to figure this one out myself. Sandisk supports the Western Digital SSD line, so I opened a ticket with them. They could provide no assistance. So I de-installed all of my WD software (WD Discovery and WD Utilities). I noted that on their website, WD Discovery is now listed as Big Sur compatible, but WD Utilities is not. However, after doing all of this I noticed that I had something called WDDesktop Finder Extensions running. I found nothing about this on either the Sandisk or WD websites. There is manual uninstall instructions for what I removed and this was NOT included in this instructions. I found the components in my /System directory. Nowhere could I find any mention of WD software residing in the /System directory. I deleted everything WD from there and rebooted. I then verified that WDDesktop Finder Extensions was not running in Activity Monitor.


I want to point out that one of the most helpful tools I have for problems like this turned out to be Carbon Copy Cloner. It is very sensitive to I/O errors and will show you error rates on each drive.


After that last reboot I am getting no I/O errors on any of my drives. Carbon Copy Cloner was quite happy to help me restore my external SSD drive from backups.


Nobody seems to actually know what this software was, but one person at Sandisk speculated it was part of WD Utilities. Since the WD Utilities uninstall process doesn't remove it I have to speculate it is obsolete software that is no longer compatible with MacOS.


Although I am now stable on Big Sur, I am still not happy with Apple. Software doesn't just work if you leave stuff behind when you upgrade. Apple is ultimately responsible for the entire ecosystem and although this was WD's fault for not documenting and cleaning up their software, Apple needs to be better at identifying obsolete software. The fact that I had to spend my own time to diagnose and resolve this problem with basically no assistance from either vendor is not good.


So how did I get here? Last year I purchased this 2019 MacBook Pro and as has been normal with a hardware upgrade, I used Migration Assistant to restore the backup from my previous MacBook Pro. This makes life easier but it also brings along any left over software that you might not want to keep. Once upon a time I would wipe my main drive (after verifying I had a good backup) before upgrading MacOS. Then I would spend days re-installing all of the software I was confident was compatible with the new MacOS. As Apple moves to its own chips and continues to merge MacOS and iOS/iPadOS functions, it is probably time to return to this methodology.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 23, 2020 6:38 AM in response to Jerome Vitner

I had to figure this one out myself. Sandisk supports the Western Digital SSD line, so I opened a ticket with them. They could provide no assistance. So I de-installed all of my WD software (WD Discovery and WD Utilities). I noted that on their website, WD Discovery is now listed as Big Sur compatible, but WD Utilities is not. However, after doing all of this I noticed that I had something called WDDesktop Finder Extensions running. I found nothing about this on either the Sandisk or WD websites. There is manual uninstall instructions for what I removed and this was NOT included in this instructions. I found the components in my /System directory. Nowhere could I find any mention of WD software residing in the /System directory. I deleted everything WD from there and rebooted. I then verified that WDDesktop Finder Extensions was not running in Activity Monitor.


I want to point out that one of the most helpful tools I have for problems like this turned out to be Carbon Copy Cloner. It is very sensitive to I/O errors and will show you error rates on each drive.


After that last reboot I am getting no I/O errors on any of my drives. Carbon Copy Cloner was quite happy to help me restore my external SSD drive from backups.


Nobody seems to actually know what this software was, but one person at Sandisk speculated it was part of WD Utilities. Since the WD Utilities uninstall process doesn't remove it I have to speculate it is obsolete software that is no longer compatible with MacOS.


Although I am now stable on Big Sur, I am still not happy with Apple. Software doesn't just work if you leave stuff behind when you upgrade. Apple is ultimately responsible for the entire ecosystem and although this was WD's fault for not documenting and cleaning up their software, Apple needs to be better at identifying obsolete software. The fact that I had to spend my own time to diagnose and resolve this problem with basically no assistance from either vendor is not good.


So how did I get here? Last year I purchased this 2019 MacBook Pro and as has been normal with a hardware upgrade, I used Migration Assistant to restore the backup from my previous MacBook Pro. This makes life easier but it also brings along any left over software that you might not want to keep. Once upon a time I would wipe my main drive (after verifying I had a good backup) before upgrading MacOS. Then I would spend days re-installing all of the software I was confident was compatible with the new MacOS. As Apple moves to its own chips and continues to merge MacOS and iOS/iPadOS functions, it is probably time to return to this methodology.

Dec 23, 2020 6:41 AM in response to Jerome Vitner

Jerome Vitner wrote:

Although I am now stable on Big Sur, I am still not happy with Apple. Software doesn't just work if you leave stuff behind when you upgrade. Apple is ultimately responsible for the entire ecosystem and although this was WD's fault for not documenting and cleaning up their software, Apple needs to be better at identifying obsolete software. The fact that I had to spend my own time to diagnose and resolve this problem with basically no assistance from either vendor is not good.


I couldn't disagree more.


It isn't Apple's responsibility to track the billions of pieces of third party software in the world and try to figure out what might be compatible with a new OS release and what won't.


They do what they can - each new OS release will move apps it knows won't work because they use outdated libraries and such to an incompatible apps folder, but for the rest Apple can neither test them all nor be prescient about whatever ill-informed assumptions were baked into them.


Migration Assistant has always had that issue, as once again Apple can't know whether the application bits it's copying over are a broken third party utility or something vital for use on your company's network.

Dec 23, 2020 9:27 AM in response to BobTheFisherman

I acknowledge that and will be more cautious in the future. But up until a few years ago most external drives were formatted for Windows only and you had to use the vendor's utilities to format them for Mac. In my experience that isn't true now. But there is one more problem that Apple must address and that is support for S.M.A.R.T. on external drives. And how many posts are there out there about how Disk Utility is often inadequate and you have to resort to using the Unix command line tools to fix problems.

Feb 3, 2021 11:45 PM in response to Jerome Vitner

Confirming.

I upgraded to Big Sur a few weeks ago.

Since then...


The SD card I use for photography was suddenly unreadable, trying to reformat it broke it completely. Is not readable or restorable from my Macbook Pro, my wife's Windows machine, or my camera.


The external hard drive I use for backups (Journaling case sensitive Mac filesystem) started giving write errors when trying to copy files to it and doesn't mount on the updated MacBook anymore.

I did get my other Mac (not upgraded) to access it in read-only emergency mode and am now creating safety copies.


Big Sur with all its shortcomings caused me many hours of unnecessary work and has weakened my formerly firm belief in Apple as a producer of mature, reliable products. I feel reminded of Windows (what was the big fail's name again)... ME? Vista?


Whoever user reads this at the beginning of 2021 - DO NOT UPDATE TO BIG SUR (yet?)!

I will spend extra time to revert the update now.


Any help with restoring my external disk or gaining trust in it's reliability again is obviously appreciated.

Feb 4, 2021 12:03 AM in response to klausillusioni

1) Photo SD cards usually prefer to be formatted in the camera after each use to erase them, or at least that’s what Canon and Nikon recommend.


2) Why did you use journaled HFS+ and especially case sensitive? For the last several releases the recommended file system has been APFS. Case sensitive HFS+, journaled or not, was always an issue as various apps and other programs were not case sensitive and expected operations to succeed regardless of case.


Not trying to defer blame, just curious as to your rationale for the above.


If your external drive is giving write errors that’s a failure of the disk hardware and has nothing to do with macOS per se.


Feb 4, 2021 3:47 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

Quite a surprise that two totally different (and anything but old) pieces of hardware decide to fail within a short time frame after the update - both being related to file system or partitioning aspects.

By posting our incidents we're collecting data points here.

Pure odds? Possible yet not very likely.


Regarding "Formatting SD Card":

When the MacBook says something like "Can't read card. Please format." it should be safe to assume that it knows to do that. So spare me the "you should rather do it in way 3 of 5 and possibly at full moon", please. Apple tries to save us from aspects that require far less technical understanding and hides details because the user "need not know". Don't even try to argue it is the user's (i.e. my) fault to accept the system's suggestion.

Plus: If it was the hardware - no point for your argument to format it in the camera. If it wasn't - why did the system not read a formerly functioning card in the first place?


Regarding the file system:

A capital letter has a different character code than a lowercase one. To the machine they're two different things. In many development projects case matters.

More important: I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CARE! Apple chose not to support several other file systems and to offer HFS. If they offer it they need to work it correctly and not brick my drive after a system update.

Any arguments about that being the user's responsibility will not receive an answer from my side.


Will only respond to (and appreciate) helpful hints from here.


Best regards and carpe diem.

Feb 4, 2021 4:22 AM in response to klausillusioni

I didn’t say the SD card failed, but rather most camera vendors recommend you format them in the camera. Theoretically there shouldn’t be a difference but I always format mine in my camera and have never had an issue.


The drive may have had a hardware issue; write failures usually are an indication of a hardware fault rather than software.


Yes, upper case is different from lower case, but for decades the Mac file system didn’t differentiate and many applications got used to that. In particular, Adobe apps used to be problematic as sometimes they would refer to a file in lower case, sometimes all caps and sometimes mixed case and they expected them all to access the same file.


You can use upper case and yell all you like as to how you want things to work, but I’m describing how things actually work.


You can feel free to accept my facts or not, it doesn’t change reality.

External SSD drives corrupted and fail with Big Sur

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