External Samsung Portable SSD T5 keeps ejecting itself under macOS even when neither Mac nor HDs ever sleep – back to Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD

A few weeks ago good mother @vowe made me aware of an Amazon.de special offer for the external Samsung Portable SSD T5. Since one of my SuperDuper! backup drives failed a few days ago, my wife also needed some new backup drives, and the Arlo Pro 2 base station for continuous video recording, I ordered four of them.

The latter one worked flawlessly after I formatted it with FAT – yeah. But the other three keep ejecting themselves after some time – meh. I know all the Energy Saver settings to prevent the Macs and hard disk from sleeping automatically. But nothing seems to prevent the unwanted ejecting.

I don’t know if it was related on my insistence to format the T5 with APFS (ding!) but three different Macs (an iMac 5K, a MacBook Adorable and a MacBook Air) all with the latest macOS version could not be wrong. So I took it to the Internet and boy what a mess I found. Suggestions to use some Windows tools from Samsung to disable some security settings on the T5 or to install some kext drivers on my Macs. I was sure I would have found some terminal commands to make the T5 behave as expected – but I didn’t want to go this route.

Then I remembered the Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD attached to my iMac 5K via an OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock. This SSD worked reliably and quietly for years, that I nearly forgot it. Luckily Amazon.de doesn’t make any fuss when returning stuff so I sent the Samsungs back and ordered the same amount from Sandisk. These now work like a charm, even with APFS and we will forget them surely soon.

PS None of the Amazon.de links are affiliate links – just that you know.