External NVMe drive spontaneously dismounts

[James Steele]

Well after much anguish, hair pulling and gnashing of teeth, I've done something that's really difficult for a Pisces to do: I made a decision. I got spoiled by the faster enclosure in the short time that I had it. And I know there's many "logical" reasons why for VIs the slightly faster load times (for example to load one 1.2GB Superior Drummer 3 kit and then another one of the similar size) shouldn't really be that big a factor. How often do you do that? Once you load a kit and decided on it, you're good? But I just get off on loading big kit after big kit and seeing them load that much faster... even if it's just a few seconds each time.

So I'm going to put up with occasionally having to unplug/replug the faster enclosure. I *do* think it's a little bit better with the WD Blue, so I'm going to keep that and return the WD Black. For reads, the Blue is pretty close to the Black and it's less power draw and runs cooler it seems. One issue I'm getting that I think is due to the faster enclosure is that occasionally on restarts, I'll get a "your computer wasn't shut down properly" error message, even if it was. It happens rarely and I don't think it "hurts" anything. I haven't done it enough to verify, but I think ejecting the drive before restarting prevents that.

I DO want to thank Mike, HC Markus, Michael Canavan, cuttime, and everyone who chimed in with suggestions and ideas. I do value your input and every little bit of it helped me along the way. It's less than perfect, and maybe not a decision that makes sense for anyone else, but I just got hooked on the extra speed. It seems to happen infrequently enough and once it's mounted it seems fine from there on, so I guess I'm willing to accept the trade off of having to unplug and replug it. So again, thank you guys so much for letting me sort of work through this here.

[James Steele]

Here's another little data point to share, just because it's interesting.

Daisy chaining my external NVMe drive off the back of the UAD-2 TB3 Satellite OCTO slowed down both write and read times. This was when it was idle and no plugs were loaded. Read speed dropped roughly 200 MB/s from roughly 2750 MB/s to 2550 MB/s. As a result, I connected it back to the Mac. Just thought I'd share that. I didn't expect it to make a difference like that.

[James Steele]

Following up on this old topic. It's very early to say for sure, but it seems that after updating to Monterrey 12.6.2, my external drive seems to be mounting every time upon boot up. Crossing my fingers that this holds.

[James Steele]

Following up on this old topic. It's very early to say for sure, but it seems that after updating to Monterrey 12.6.2, my external drive seems to be mounting every time upon boot up. Crossing my fingers that this holds.

MEH!!! Disregard. Just did a restart and the external didn't mount! Oh well...

[James Steele]

Okay... another data point. I decided to daisy chain my NVMe drive enclosure off of the UAD-2 TB Satellite OCTO. I loose about 200MB/s off my read/write speeds but I'm still at 2500MB/s so who cares, really? Point is... every time I boot the Mac Studio the NVMe drive is always there. The only thing I need to remember is not to turn off the OCTO while the Mac is still powered up or the drive is improperly unmounted.

But so far... so good. Not ideal of course but glad it's sorted itself out.