External SSD appears twice in Finder sidebar

Just had this happen with a new Sonnet NVME Dual TB Dock and two Crucial P3 Plus 4TB SSDs.

iMac 2020 i9 Intel, OSX Ventura 13.5.2

What I found which appeared to solve it for me was

1 : In finder I select remove from sidebar for one of each duplicate.

2: Immediately reboot.

As far as I can tell the problem has currently disappeared.

Tried two reboots to test and finder sidebar appears to be behaving at the moment.

Time will tell if problem reoccurs.

Cheers

David

Looks to be a finder bug

Happens to me too. I just remove one of the instances from the sidebar and move on. Apparently this an unfixed non fatal bug.

Yes, remove from Finder was solution for me as well. Definately Finder bug.

Same issue. Up to date Ventura, MBP M2 16”, OWC Envoy Pro SX 4TB SSD, formatted single partition APFS, expensive ($110) Apple Thunderbolt cable.

System is shut down at night; drives remain physically attached, start up in AM.

(Now, there is a classic older duplicate drive issue when Time Machine drive is plugged in, and under certain unknowable conditions, two separate identical System drive icons will appear on the desktop. You can eject the phantom/time capsule one, but of course not your actual startup drive.)

I am moderately paranoid about Apple’s continued issues with handling external drives … because I had a months-long AppleCare case trying to solve spontaneous ejection of certain HDD drives. Issue was never actually solved, Apple had not a clue - even though a search will reveal dozens of people having issue going back at least five years, several OSX versions and CPU hardware. We finally completely formatted MBP at the store from scratch, then restored data drive from Time Machine, AND abandoned the problem rotational drives altogether. I retell all of this only because, the best theory on the many Apple Discussion threads, maintained that the hardware and OS X versions are increasingly tweaky in the constant data and power communication through UBS bus to external devices, favor SSDs and APFS, and certain HDDs (which should be formatted HFS+ to work correctly) are just not up to the task of understanding the microsecond handshakes, standby and power down vs sleep and other communication. They just eject, then remount a few seconds later, until the OS messes with them again. This happened with separate Glyph and LaCie drives.

So now Ventura is buggy even in communicating with high end SSD drives in APFS, like Samsung T7 or my Envoy Pro.

Not good, especially when fixes are the same ones shoveled on us since 1986: “Did you restart the computer!”

This just started in July 2023. First just one external drive appeared twice, now most of them do. Ran disk utility on each and they are fine. It doesn't seem to effect operations at the moment. I can't explain it, but it is worrisome.

Hello DIT Ed,

Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities. We see you have some questions about your external hard drive and that it shows twice in Finder, and we'd like to help. Although this step may seem simple, have you tried restarting your Mac, and then plugging your external drive in to see if the issue remains? This can sometimes help with connection issues: Shut down or restart your Mac

Restart your Mac

* On your Mac, choose Apple menu  > Restart.

* If you don’t want app windows that are open to reopen when your Mac restarts, deselect “Reopen windows when logging back in.”

We'd also like to try and determine if this is happening other places with your Mac, which can help us isolate more of what's going on. By doing this, please boot your Mac up in safe mode, and let us know if this is also happening there: Start up your Mac in safe mode

Let us know, and we'll go from there.

Regards.

Thanks for keeping the thread up to speed DIT Ed,

In addition to safe mode, testing whether the behavior occurs in more than one user account was definitely a helpful step in isolating the behavior. Thanks for posting back with your results.

From here, we recommend that you contact Apple Support, and share the results of your isolation steps. What was learned can help Apple Support plan and facilitate the best next steps.

Cheers!

I have the same issue, just started on July 10, 2023. I did use disk utility to format another SSD external drive, but gave it a different name. Might disk utility be involved?

Yes, I shutdown the computer every time I am done using it. I did get a solution from member "Ku4hx" that got rid of the second occurrence in Finder. Here is his reply to me on another thread:

Right click and select "Remove from Sidebar" for one of them is all I know to do. Nobody else had an explanation either as I recall.

Silly bug and I found only Jettison app is helping to auto disconnect and reconnect after sleep.

It works well only till it is still syncing or still used while going to sleep....so not perfect, but still good.

External SSD Partition appears twice in Finder sidebar in SONOMA as well on my new mac mini pro: May have to delete all data and reformat drive. Partition 2 is a Time machine back up of intitail install. Partition 1 shows as duplicates in FINDER even after unmonut and remount. Behaves like a ghost or shadow drive but 1.5 GB not possible on 1 GB External drive: changes on one show up on the other.

Hi Mikeg28806, I have the same issue - I'll be contacting apple support but just wanted to log it here.

Same here same issue. First external didn't show up. When i checked it had been deselected in settings for external drives to show. Now I've re-checked and now it shows two.