rerickson wrote:
USB hub has been swapped.
First step in troubleshooting is to bypass any hubs and connect directly to your Mac. Not a permanent solution but a temporary step to try to determine if the hub is incompatible with something (such as the external drive itself, its software, something installed ...)
WD Drive Utilities stalls for Status Check or Drive Test. Unable to eject drive, says in use.
Using WD Drive Utilities is not advised as it can conflict with the MacOS (which has its own native way to interact with external drives) or other software. If you can completely uninstall WD Utilities, do so. This may require first copying off all file contents so they can be restored to the drive when it is formatted properly with Apple Disk Utility without interference from any third party utilities. Note that the Time Machine contents cannot be copied off and copied back, Time Machine would have to be started fresh on the newly formatted drive. Since the drive is not working for you anyway, you might elect to do this.
Disk Utility First Aid reports normal.
That just means that the file catalog is normal. There could be a hardware problem. Seems unlikely since you saw this with two drives but hardware could be faulty. You won't know, however, until you remove the hub and the WD software from the picture and do a true isolated test with the Apple formatted drive connected directly to the Mac.
Failure then happens overnight; sometimes after as little as an hour.
This could be a hardware problem. How is the drive getting power, from its own power supply or from the hub?
WD EasyStore 8T; APFS container with 2 partitions: 2T APFS for Time Machine, and 6T OS Extended (Journaled)
Blending Time Machine volumes with general storage on a single hardware device is never recommended. If the hardware fails or some other problem develops (like you are experiencing), you lose all contents.
Sleep Timer is off.
What sleep timer? Is that from the WD Utilities? That might be contributing to the problem.
Macbook Pro 16" late 2019, Sequoia 15.7.3.
You are up to date on Sequoia so should be ok there.
What I would do:
- Start a new Time Machine backup on a new external drive formatted APFS/GUID with no third party drive utility/software/firmware.
- Copy off all general storage from the existing (problematic) external.
- Format that external with APFS/GUID and don't use third party drive utilities/software/firmware.
- Check for proper drive function without the hub.
- If ok, then try with the hub.
- Use the reformatted external for either Time Machine or general storage but not both on the same hardware.
