Q: Disk Drive ejecting itself

I have a tower of the Hitachi G-Technology drives (7 of them to be exact).....they have been absolutely amazing, possibly the best/fastest drives I've ever owned. The ejecting problem appears to NOT be from the drives themselves, but something going on with Mac OS X. I'm running 10.6.7 on an 8-core MacPro and when transferring large files. I just spent an hour on the phone with G-Tech and the problem appears at around the 245 Gig point....doesn't matter what type of data, doesn't matter which of the 7 drives (6 of them are 4TB, 1 of them is 2TB) and also doesn't seem to matter whether connected to this machine or a 17" MacBookPro laptop via ESATA, FW800, FW400 or USB, so I don't think it is a power issue as these drives all are direct-powered through APC systems (of which there are 2 connected to the machine/drives). I have tried transferring both video and an encapsulated database both of which are HUGE, and even with a completely blank, clean 4TB drive, it won't take beyond the 245Gig point without auto-ejecting. Have tried everything and nothing seems to fix the problem.....doesn't matter which drive I'm moving from/to, doesn't matter what cable I'm using, doesn't matter the file type. HELP!

Sorry, but sad to say that copying at around the 245 Gig point is not the cause.
Coping the same chunk of files, with exact the same size of data less or more then 245 Gigs, on two different G-Tech drives of mine, ejects one of them, but not the other one. And, that same G-Tech drive ejects itself every 3-4 days even if I do not copy anything onto it.

Let's try to gather some more situations when this happens and to try to pinpoint into the reason.

My update: 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go performed successful 80GB backup, but as more files were added, it would fail at 95GB. Tried dropping files onto the drive, and it still ejected. So it's not a Time Machine problem. Bought a powered USB hub, still ejected.

Bought a new WD 1TB My Book Mac, self-powered, works like a charm.

And my own update:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I sent off my Hitachi 500 Gb G-Drive Mini for replacement, so in the meantime I'm using my "old" 250 Gb G-Drive for Time Machine backup.

Strangely the ol' 250 seems to be working fine with no self-ejections. I do get an occasional "the disk was not ejected properly" warning coming onscreen (and as before with the 500, only when I wake my Mac), but in fact, each time the warning appears, I find that the disk is still connected. Don't know what that's all about, but likely it is yet another of the many clues we've all gathered here as to what this problem is all about. Let's hope the Apple engineers are taking note of this discussion.

When I get my replacement 500 from Hitachi, I'll report back.

Message was edited by: onemac

I've got a Western Digital Passport and a Samsung Drive in this Macally Enclosure and they both work great.

My other Samsung drive in this iNeo enclosure ejects itself all the time. It usually only takes a few minutes of file transfer.

It ejects itself on both my 2007 era Macbook Pro and my 2010 11" Macbook Air. It is USB 3.0 compatible so I've tried both the built in USB 3 cable and a USB 2 cable. Also tried reformatting the drive multiple times, and turning off spotlight. Nothing works and the drive is useless a this point.

My contribution:

I have a 32GB Sandisk flash drive that ejects every time I try to copy large files from/to my Mid 2010 Macbook Pro 15". This same flash drive works flawlessly on my Mid 2009 Macbook and on various Windows machines I've tested it on. I am yet to test it on my Macbook Air 11".

I thought it could be a power issue, but curiously the problem persists with a WD 1TB self powered external hard drive. As this hard drive also works on a number of other machines, I am pretty sure it is not a drive issue, but a MBP problem.

Has anyone taken the machine to apple support?

All my Macs are running 10.6.7 and with every other update available.

Coutinho,

Some many weeks ago I did take my MacBook Pro to an Apple store, and one of their Genius staff plugged it into some diagnostic equipment (using what looked like an Ethernet cable) and tested the machine, including all the ports. He found nothing wrong with it, and told me just to ignore the ejections! (That didn't sit very well with some other Apple support folks I've spoken with since).

I've been wondering since if I should go back to the Apple store, get my Mac hooked up to that same diagnostic equipment, plug in my G-Drive and then try to instigate a self-ejection. I'm assuming that something would show on the diagnostic equipment.

I've saved 61 Console logs of self-ejection events, but apparently such information is not useful for the engineers in finding out what's going on. I would hope that, unlike Console, the Apple store's equipment would be able to see exactly what's happening with all relevant software and hardware involved in an ejection, but maybe I'm dreaming in Technicolour!

Would it be worth trying this?

Update:

I got a SSD and I spent the last days installing it. Looking for a solution to this USB problem, I've decided to go for a brand new Mac OS Install. Curiously the problem seems to happen a lot more scarcely now and for a moment I thought it was gone. I had a couple of ejections last night trying to copy two 5GB files to the 32GB Sandisk flash drive after it had a couple of successful copies. On the other hand the self powered WD external drive haven't had a single ejection after transferring over 1TB of files distributed in various attempts.

I don't know if this brings any light to the problem, but the fact is that these two drives were pretty much useless before the new install as they couldn't stand a couple of minutes before ejecting themselves.

What if I tell this case to tuaw.com or macworld.com and they make article about this?
Will Apple pay attention to this case and fix the problem?

Happy (Ironic) World Backup Day!

Just this morning, I woke to find one of my drives disconnected itself. I left some files to copy overnight and verified they had finished copying (once I reconnected the drive). However once I started opening files to verify they were in fact intact, the app would just hang, Finder would tell me a drive had forcibly ejected itself and I'd have to force quit the application.

I reconnected and reopened the same problematic file and lo and behold, at the same point, the drive would disconnect. But as I continued to inspect the problem, the drive would begin ejecting after some usage, not at any particular file, just random.

Finally, I ran Drive Genius 3's Scan on it and it would reach random amounts (a few seconds to 15 minutes) into the scan before it would disconnect.

Now I'm awaiting another external caddy to isolate if the issue is with my case. It's the same case as mine, bought at the same time. See below for details.

Hello all,

I'm having the same problem with a mac mini 10.6.7 and a Drobo (USB). I was trying the "repair disk" suggestion, but the Drobo keeps ejecting during the repair...

I'll try with Firewire...

I deleted my Time Machine preferences, and so far everything is working.

Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

Me too.

Argh! I tried this and things were going perfectly until it ejected itself after about 40 GB of data transfer. I thought we had it.

Edit: It looks like the OS wrote a new plist file. Hmmm...

Message was edited by: Starhawk

I didn't even had a chance to think it was solved. My USB Flash Drive ejected before completing the first GB.

Too bad. =(