dropped SSD slow to remount

[MLGochnauer]

MacBook Pro 10,1
macOS 10.15.1
SSD: ASM236X NVME 2TB on USB 3.0

When this 2TB SSD is accidentally disconnected (not ejected), it takes several minutes to reappear after fixing the connection.
During the wait, the busy light on the drive flashes continuously, as though the drive is doing some kind of housekeeping.
This occurs even if I reboot the computer, so it seems that something on the drive needs to be rewritten.

This does not seem to happen with a Samsung 1TB T3 SSD, also attached to USB.

Both drives are ExFAT, although the ASM has an EFI partition and the Samsung does not.

The Samsung T3 is identified (by System Information / USB) as having "Windows_NTFS" content.
The ASM is identified as having "Microsoft Basic Data" content.

Is there anything I can do to avoid the slow restart of the ASM?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Part of the issue may be because Macs don't natively support NTFS drives. ExFAT can be a little dicey on Macs as well. Normally, drives used on a Mac should use a partition map type of GUID (Mac OS Extended Journaled) or APFS depending on which version of macOS and how they will be used.

Do you use the drives on Windows PCs as well?

C

 

[MLGochnauer]

Yes. I have Windows programs that are supposed to give 'transparent' access to Mac drives (including APFS), but they seemed frustratingly hit or miss. Except for the remounting of a dropped drive, macOS 10.15 seems to read/write ExFAT drive pretty well.

Do you have idea whether "Windows_NTFS" and "Microsoft Basic Data" indicate a meaningful difference between the two ExFAT drives?

It is somewhat frustrating that macOS gives the user so few options for tinkering with low level characteristics of drives. (Yes, I started using computers just as DOS was being bumped up to version 2.1 )

 

[Cory Cooper]

Yes, they may show "Windows_NTFS" and "Microsoft Basic Data" because there is a slight difference in the way they are setup/formatted.

Maybe a screenshot showing that information would help.

Also, check  > System Preferences... > Energy Saver and try unchecking Put hard disks to sleep when possible. Sometimes that will cause intermittent unmounting of external drives if it is enabled.

C