Hi there, I connected perfectly healthy Seagate mini 2 TB USB drive to my Synology DS923+ NAS drive. I moved files back and forth and everything was fine and dandy until I just unplugged a drive and went to connect it to my iMac. Sure, NAS software said, next time unmount drive before unplugging it. But that was after the fact. Mac can’t see it no matter what. In Disk utility it’s there but can’t be mounted, erased, formatted, read or written. What can I do? Will PC be better in connecting to that drive. As of now it acts bricked.
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Am I just dumb? Why would one connect a drive to a NAS, move files around, then connect that drive to another machine? Why wouldn’t you just access the NAS from… idk… the network?
Fair question, I had large amount of files, photos and videos to move and since NAS has 2 x USB ports I thought why not? Over the network it’s quite slow. The thing worked fine, I left it connected for 2 days and then came up with stupid idea to unplug it and do something with it on my iMac.
Copying over a network can be slower if not a high speed link I would expect.
How is it formatted? NTFS? ExFAT? BTRFS?
This comment should be higher up
Mac OS Extended Journaled, could easily read it on PC.
Try connecting it directly, using SATA, to a machine running a flavor of linux, like ubuntu. I have found that they are much more forgiving. You might try a different USB adapter, but that just adds more to the troubleshoot chain.
I assume you’ve don’t this before and the Synology uses a disk format that Mac can read?
Have you tried reconnecting it to the synology or whoever it was before and see if it pops up then properly eject it
I would see if HDDSuperClone LiveCD operating system can see it. If not you are probably looking at physical drive issues with my amateur experience in dealing with dieing drives.
If you connect that drive back to the NAS, do you see the files? If you can, then the drive was probably formatted to a file system that your iMac can’t read.
Synology doesn’t see drive any more. Tried that.
rewrite boot sector, reformat and use again.
if that does not help you probably really killed it.
Who unplugs external devices without unmounting them? Computer 101.
Well when your PC holds your USB device hostage for no apparent reason (looking at you, Windows), sometimes you have to just yank it.
I agree, it’s a pita to have to go through that stupid eject business but I learned quite awhile back with trashed flash drive information when I’d pull out before doing the Windows ritual.
Problem is I will plug a drive in, not even write anything to it, and it frequently keeps it hostage indefinitely sometimes. Either shut down the PC or yank it out.
I learned to wait awhile after reading from or writing to it. It’s usually a related app that hasn’t fully shut down to “release” the drive or some buffering.
Thanks. I’m aware of that, but unfortunately there’s nothing to tell you what is keeping it from being released. Heck even just plugging it in without accessing it, it can be locked.
The only thing I’ve found is this utility that costs $30: https://safelyremove.com/features.htm
This is the kind of stuff that should be made readily available by the OS instead of a generic “can’t eject now” nonsense.
I just disable windows caching to USB devices, and solves the problem, but shouldn’t need to.
What exactly is it “trashing” because I’ve been doing this for 20 years and have never lost a file. To be clear, I never put anything on a USB flash stick I’m not ready to lose in the first place, and I could just re-transfer the file or reformat it if necessary.
I even do it with bootable USB drives, windows installation, etc. Never had a problem. Not saying it’s incorrect, I’m just really curious what information is being lost or corrupted when doing this, and if it really matters for the vast majority of situations, because my personal experience tells me no.
edit: I guess it’s a write cache thing, I do vaguely remember this being a concern in the past, but I never had issues with just pulling the drive regardless.
It’s fine on most if not all USB thumb drives nowadays. Windows has disabled its write cache on removable devices since like 2016. It was more annoying than anything anyway since the cache just soaked up all the writes into system memory with no throttling. Then you could be sitting there for half an hour not knowing the progress of the writes on the drive if it was a slow flash drive.
For external SSDs it’s a must to do a safe removal since the drive’s write cache will almost always be enabled, or if it’s disabled the drive’s performance will tank. Not sure about DRAM-less SSDs though. Also, SSDs can corrupt more than just the data being modified, so the stakes are higher.
For external SMR hard drives the write cache will always be enabled since they basically can’t function without it, so it would be a good idea to do a safe removal then. Plus the drive gets shutdown cleanly. A surprise power cut makes the head slam back with the residual energy from the spinning platters and I’ve seen it kill a couple drives.
TL;DR thumb drives you can just yank on windows, everything else you should probably do a safe removal
Mac users are built different
Depends on what you mean by ‘bricked’.
I used to have a WD Elements drive that when I unplugged the USB before the power EVERY SINGLE time it would turn the drive* from ‘NTFS’ to ‘RAW’ format. I found a guide online with instructions to open the drive in this particular hex editor and change the code at a specific address depending on what the format was supposed to be ie NTFS. I forgot a couple more times but after fixing it for oh the 4th or 5th time I finally remembered to unplug the power before the USB cable lol… Fun times.
*I should clarify, it changed the notation in the MBR as to what the drive was formatted with.
Thanks for advice, this exceeds my “expertise” level.
What, you don’t take drives out of a NAS once its installed unless you are upgrading them.