Disk Drive ejecting itself

Have you tried to format your drive with "Mac OSX Extended Jounaled (encrypted)" filesystem ?

It worked for me and my 2 TB Western Digital Drive:

http://marketmix.com/de/wordpress-blog/externe-festplatte-ausgeworfen/

-- Harald

Apparently they aret not going to do anything about the issue since it has been brought to their attention hundreds of times with no response. There have been over 700 comments on this board alone due to the OS powering down the USB ports at random. It also effects the firewire ports as well.

I discovered this when I attempted to switch to Mac. I am a photographer and have a dozen external drives that I put my images on. They all eject at random regardless of their size or brand. I have tried various hubs with or without power but the issue just happens at random with any of them. It can happen either while the drive is being accessed or when it is just idle.

I had lost some images when it did it while transferring them to one of the drives so I just bought a new i7 PC and gave the mac to my grandson to use for school work. The loss of those images might very well have cost me money so I if I can't rely on the system it is of no value to me.

Also since going back to a PC I am still using all of the same external drives with not a single issue but with the Mac it happened to any drive multiple times. I seldom went through a single day without a problem with one or more random ejections.

I had the same problem with Time Machine disk spontaneously ejecting: I used "Repair Disk" under the Disk Utility and it seems to have corrected the problem.

This issue has nothing to do with Time Machine. I never used Time Machine and any one of my drives would drop out at random times. The only way to get the OS to recognize the drive again was to restart the system. This indicates that the OS is shutting off the port.

Yes, I agree; however, you can use Repair Disk for any memory device that is connected to your Mac. Restarting the system won't fundamentally repair an external disk that is causing an issue for Mac.

The drives have never needed any repair. They are fine. The issue is with the OS shutting down the ports at random when a drive is connected! The drives can be connected to any other system and they are fine. After restarting the Mac the ports are powered up and will work again but sooner or later they drop out at random.

This is a OS issue and has nothing to do with drives, hubs etc. I have a dozen different external drives and it has happened to all of them. They all will function as expected on any other system and will work again on the Mac after a reboot. Since I rely on my data to make a living I have gone back to a PC as I have never had any issues like this on one. I rely on external drives to store my images and when I lose some because the drive drops off while using it I lose money. I thought that I would get support from Apple but that is simply non existant. There are hundreds of users that have experienced this problem but Apple has not done anything to try to fix the issue.

Believe me, its about cables. I have been haunted by this problem for absolutely ages, and I finally figured it out that its about cables. Put it another way, its about OS X's sensitivity to non-perfect cables. I eventually found a couple of cables that work, I stick with those cables with all of my USB 2 and 3 storage devices, then I never had any more problem.

I have tried numerous cables combinations with the issue continueing. The problem also extends to firewire drives as well. Cables are not the problem at all. I have tested the usb ports after a disconnect and they have no power. The OS is doing a disconnect at random and the only way to get the ports active again is to restart. I have been a PC and Mac tech for over 20 years and have never seen this with any system prior to the OS X update. Now I see it frequently with my customers. It is an OS X issue that Apple has yet to correct.

Maybe you have another problem than I did. But I used to think it wasn't the cable as well, and you wouldn't believe how long and how many cables I had to go through to figure that one out. Put it this way, it wasn't really the cables, its just OS X required some god-know-what cables, all I know is that some will work and now I have a USB 3 3TB sitting here without disconnecting since I used this particular cable, some as a USB 2 2TB on my desk in the office. I work in an international school with over 2000 Macs, and we didn't have a single issue with USB drives since we figured out what to look for, admittedly, we now have a lot of perfectly fine cables to give away to other PC based schools nearby.

Whose cables did you buy? (Part #?)

Did you go back and try with a 'bad' cable to make sure that the problem really is what you think it is, rather than something that stopped happening for no/some other reason?

You descrives exactly what happens to me all the time.... every day.

Since some time I have to live with data loss in large dimensions. Only because I don't rely on Time Machine but on CCC I have backups. But that' since half a year I have to keep 2 backups all the time.

Working as professional photographer and video maker, this is a huge loss of time an motivation.

The Apple support only reply " oh no we have never heard of such a problem " and can't help in any way.

I wonder how long I will stay with apple since I hear that windows collegues can plug an work.

It used to be the other way around. Now plug and pray has become daily routine.

Please let us know when anyone finds a solution.

I can't give you a particular model or part number, because it wan't like that. We found that it is really down to a particular cable. We have some new cables came with LaCie drives that didn't work (some did) while some cheap unbrand cables from local market also work. But the chance is higher if you get quality branded cables, and the shorter the better the chance as well.

Cables have nothing to do with this issue!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When the OS cuts the USB port it will not have power. No cable will work. I have tested the ports after it is dis-connected and they have no power! Nothing will work when the OS disconnects the port!

If your ports completely shutdown, that means your have a different issue than the rest of us, or at least majority of us. I just read back a couple of pages, and many indeed fixed the problem by swapping cables, which obviously had the same problem as we did, "disk drive ejecting itself" instead of port shutting down.

I'm also now experiencing this issue on my Icy Box enclosure 😟. It has been working fine for the past few months on my new mac mini, now it simply won't stay mounted to the OS.

I've tried:

• Different cables.
• Taking hard drives out of the enclosure and putting them back in again.
• Using disk utllity to verify and repair.
• Used DiskWarrior to rebuild the drive.
• Used Onyx on the system.
• Reinstalled the OS.
• Shutting down the mac mini, taking out the power cord and powering it all back up again.

Literally nothing seems to fix it; but the drives themselves are working fine. Is this an enclosure issue? It's hughly annoying seeing as I use the mini as a HTPC - pretty useless right now!

Any help appreciated.