Certainly possible. I don't have any way to completely rule that out nor completely rule "in" a macOS bug, a jacks issue, a Studio issue, etc. I suspect there will eventually be a macOS upgrade that will "magically" resolve the issue. I suspect it will get attention because Studio is being pushed at big data/big media projects and those kinds of people need big attached storage, probably in RAID setups instead of single drives capping out at 20TB maximums these days.
I've been ALL OVER the web looking for solutions and there are numbers well beyond me with the same issue- just do a search for things like "Monterey unexpected ejection", "macOS Monterey external drive eject" and all variations. Apples own
support forums have lots of people with the problem (not the only thread there on the topic)... not necessarily involving only HDD RAID boxes... going back to Big Sur. Or course, it's not
everyone having problems... else it would be a BIG deal and getting big attention. It seems to be a situation where
some enclosure hardware works and some doesn't and there's no known "list" of compatible vs. not.
Though my lens in trying to read it all, single and multi-drive SSD hardware linked via Thunderbolt seems to generally "just work" but single and multi-drive hardware linked via USB seems to be hit and miss. NAS hardware seems a bit more stable but there are some references to that too- including Time Machine disconnects- and, in my own experience, my Synology NAS seems to be having momentary disconnect-reconnect cycles... maybe 5-10 each day lasting only a few seconds... which was a very rare occurrence on prior Intel Macs running macOS < BigSur. There's plenty of "
blame the non-Apple hardware" posts too.
I assume the U in USB should generally mean it
should work as it does with the other Macs. Else it should be called SSB (Select Serial Bus) or MSB (Maybe Serial Bus), etc.
What do Intel Macs USB have that Studio does not right now? My guess is long-debugged supporting software vs. very new hardware that didn't even have access to USB at all until last couple of years. Pair that speculation with "brand new Mac" and relatively new OS and it's not a big leap to imagine a few bugs in the new system.
From all of the searching, I've tried about 10-12 things to see if I can resolve it, ranging from testing a few cables, a few jacks, the powered hubs as "middlemen" to even more "out there" options like the SUDO command to change Drive Sleep from default to the maximum possible delay. To try to test a faulty jacks hypothesis, I broke out a LOT Of HDD
single drives- including some oldies that were mostly retired. Those all stay consistently connected for more than a day. It's through that testing that got me thinking RAID specific (at least in my own hardware mix). Unfortunately, I don't happen to have another HDD RAID(s) around to test one against another. That's partially why I'm posting-
to try to find one to BUY with some confidence it will probably maintain a steady connection to this new Mac.
If it was ONLY me, I'd just go hard at blaming the OWC box in spite of it being fine (again) when I move it back to Intel Macs with the
same cable(s).
