this topic was touched upon back in the catalina days. i was plonking on my computer when the dreaded “disk not ejected properly” error popped up. eh? annoyingly, the disk is my time machine backups.
the computer is a minimac m2. external disk is a 4tb samsung rugged ssd. neither the computer nor the disk were physically touched by this mortimer snerd. “put hard disks to sleep” is disabled (per the thread from 2020). “prevent sleeping when display is off” is enabled. plus the mac was actively in use.
unfortunately, this disconnection is not unusual. this is the second time in about a month that the computer lost contact with the disk. if memory serves, reviews had lauded the rugged samsung as highly reliable.
as both devices are well out of warranty coverage, wondering if there’s some other setting i’m overlooking.
I’d check things in that order. Swapping ports and cable is usually very simple. I’d have zero reservations throwing out an unreliable drive, if you arrive at the conclusion that it’s neither a port, cable, or power issue. Especially if it’s pre-packaged (case and memory sold together as one unit).