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Symptoms: after coming back from sleep, the external WD drives show empty in Finder. But if you look at the info, it reports the used capacity correctly. Disk Utillity First Aid will fail to check it. WD Drive Utilities will fail also. You can't eject it, even though it should not be in use. The only cure I have found is to manually disconnect the drive, and reconnect it. Once it remounts, the drive appears healthy on both Mac and WD disk utilities. Happens on my iMac under High Sierra, but has been reported numerous times with many older and newer versions of MacOS. Both of my external WD drives (Passport and WD Ultra) do this. Does not seem to happen with other hard drive brands. Sounds to me like a big bad driver bug, maybe from WD. Have seen many complaints, but no solution to date. Anyone good with drivers has a solution for it or a way to investigate this further? Where should I report this so it gets developers attention?

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  • I have pretty much exclusively used WD drives except for the lone Seagate I'm still using for manual backups of various things. I haven't experienced any of these symptoms from El Capitan through Catalina. What version of macOS are you using?
    – Allan
    Commented Apr 12, 2020 at 23:55
  • High Sierra. The issue is very widely reported on many versions of the OS. It seems to be only with to WD drives.
    – CuriousMarc
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 0:33
  • It may be USB to SATA controller on the WD unit itself; there’s no drivers for it per se as it’s a universal kext from macOS. What model. WD specifically do you have?
    – Allan
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 1:02
  • @Allan: Then it may be a WD issue indeed. I have a Passport (1TB) and a Passport Ultra (2TB). I have seen others report this issue with either device. None reported for Seagate external devices for example.
    – CuriousMarc
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 6:35

1 Answer 1

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First, try running First Aid while the device is readable. If that doesn't fix the issue, then you can try using Safe Boot to isolate and fix issues with your Mac. This does not seem like an issue with macOS, more like an issue with your drive.

What is your External Drive's format? If you will be using it only on a Mac, then I would recommend formatting it to HFS (macOS Extended) or APFS. NTFS and FAT32 are not always the best choice on macOS. Before formatting, make sure to copy and paste your files to your Mac so that you can put them on the drive after formatting.

Before formatting, can you see if the data is still accessible via Terminal. To do this: cd /Volumes/YourDiskName then ls to see all the contents.

To format the drive (This will erase all data): 1. Open Disk Utility 2. Select your drive 3. Select Erase (at the top) 4. Select the format APFS or macOS Extended 5. Select Erase

If you would like to report this to developers, you can try submitting feedback to the manufacturer of the Disk or to Apple.

Here is the link to submit feedback to Apple: https://www.apple.com/feedback/

Good luck!

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  • As said in the question, First Aid reports unknown failure and WD Utilities is irresponsive when the disk/OS is in this condition, and data is inaccessible. Both report no issue when the disk is plugged again. Did you actually read the question?
    – CuriousMarc
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 6:41
  • Yes I did. Sometimes on macOS, things are possible via Terminal when not possible via the GUI. I also gave you the link to submit feedback to Apple on the issue.
    – Todd
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 15:46

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