Curious if anyone else is having a related issue. I bought a new external hard drive, an 8TB Western Digital MyBook. My purchase was based on Western Digital support telling me it was Catalina compatible.
But, when I received it, I read as much as I could and decided to format the drive in APFS format like Apple recommends for Catalina OS moving forward.
But when the computer went to sleep, the drive wouldn't wake up with the computer and when I opened it, it was blank like there were no files on it. After many hours on the phone WD support tells me, "well, the drive is Catalina compatible but only if you use HFS Plus formatting."
So now I have this drive with 3TB data on it and no way to reformat it cause I already wrote over the old failing drive.
I lucked out and realized that the drive *seems* to work if I disable "Power Nap" in Energy Saver in System Settings. But I fear that I may find down the road that something else is not compatible and want to make sure I don't lose my data.
Curious if anyone else has run into this or something similar?
Western Digital APFS drive failure in Catalina
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- KVRAF
- 2454 posts since 5 Oct, 2003
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 2454 posts since 5 Oct, 2003
Ugh, was afraid of that. He seemed really defensive about it. hmm...Forgotten wrote: Tue Mar 10, 2020 3:15 pm I think WD is bullshitting you. If it’s Catalina compatible, then surely it should support APFS?
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- KVRAF
- 11000 posts since 15 Apr, 2019 from Nowhere
Maybe the file system on the drive is just being unmounted when the computer sleeps?
You could run a mount command in the terminal and see where it is being mounted, let it sleep, and if it disappears run another mount command and see if it is still mounted.
You could run a mount command in the terminal and see where it is being mounted, let it sleep, and if it disappears run another mount command and see if it is still mounted.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 2454 posts since 5 Oct, 2003
I appreciate it. It doesn't respond to mount and unmount commands when its in this limbo state. I'm able to work with it if I turn off Power Nap but it makes me fear there may be other incompatibilities.Forgotten wrote: Tue Mar 10, 2020 4:25 pm Maybe the file system on the drive is just being unmounted when the computer sleeps?
You could run a mount command in the terminal and see where it is being mounted, let it sleep, and if it disappears run another mount command and see if it is still mounted.
So would be good to know while I can send it back if I need to.
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- KVRAF
- 16829 posts since 8 Mar, 2005 from Utrecht, Holland
Right. Send it back and demand your money back. Just tell 'em HFS Plus ain't good enough.Forgotten wrote: Tue Mar 10, 2020 3:15 pm I think WD is bullshitting you. If it’s Catalina compatible, then surely it should support APFS?
We are the KVR collective. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. 
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My MusicCalc is served over https!!
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- KVRAF
- 11000 posts since 15 Apr, 2019 from Nowhere
Did a quick search, and it seems that quite a few people are having this issue, and the same issue with previous MacOS updates. The solution seems to be WD releasing updates to their software bundled with the external drive in most cases.