Q: Disk Drive ejecting itself

I too am experiencing this most frustrating issue. Thinking it was my external drives and went and purchased two more only to find the same problem.

Interestingly enough, I have my time machine drive connected directly to the iMac and the other two drives running from a powered USB hub. The TM drive hasn't been self ejecting but the others have. In particular the drive that does it the most is the exact same model that I have TM on.

I'm getting all sorts of permission errors and frequently have to repair one of the drives that keeps ejecting (the new one that is the same as TM)

To the best of my knowledge it started happening around 3 weeks ago sporadically but now I can barely do anything without 'eject error' messages and drives unavailable after startup.

I've verified all disks, repaired them, reinstalled the OS and then migrated my files, moved all data to 2 new drives, run Onyx ... still same 'hair' pulling' & unnerving issues.

As much as I've backed up, I can't afford to lose any drives/files as I'm a photographer and that would be a death blow.

Yesterday I also started getting out of virtual memory messages and found the MDB file was hogging GB's worth of virtual memory.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Totally agree with how frustrating this is. I can't backup! I've thought about going out and buying a new drive, but it'd be a total crapshoot considering the amount of problems others are having.

I get the same thing for my iNeo external drive dock. It only seems to happen with drives over 500G.

When I had a 250G in the dock, no problem.

But I have a 1T in there now and it does it on a pretty regular basis - when writing to the drive. Reading seems OK.

Richard, Im using an iNeo dock myself with a 1.5TB drive and it self-ejects as well. I thought about trying a dock from another company, but they all look so similar Im assuming the innards are virtually all the same.

Perhaps others can open a bug report with Apple here:

http://bugreport.apple.com

My current theory is its a bug in the USB interface chip. Or it might be that the internal data bus speeds of the drive can cause a hiccup with the USB interface.

I have another drive adapter that uses a different USB interface chip:
Product ID: 0x2338
Vendor ID: 0x152d (JMicron Technology Corp.)

This device with the same 1T drive, doing the same copy operation and no auto-ejects!

The working device is a "Bytecc BT-300" carried by CanadaComputers.com ($24) and others. I would use it all the time but its not a dock, which makes me nervous having the drive and module flopping around loose on my desk....

I spent a lot of time Googling this problem and this discussion is what kept coming up no matter how I varied my search!

Run System Profiler, click on the USB hardware section, and find your iNeo device. The USB device and Vendor IDs should be different. At least I hope they are, I'm going from memory that they are... No way I'm going to interrupt my copy operation to check now! only 5% left to go....

http://canadacomputers.com/productinfo.php?cPath=79_80&itemid=015289

Copy done, no errors. ~350G in one shot.

I plugged in my iNeo model I-NA317U+ to get its USB info:
012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567:

Product ID: 0x55aa
Vendor ID: 0x174c (ASMedia Technology Inc.)
Version: 1.00
Serial Number: 000000000000000001D1
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: 01234567890123456789012345678901234567890123
Location ID: 0xfa200000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 0

So, again, this USB chip by ASmedia is the one that is auto-ejecting.

I forgot to mention I have a FreeAgent 1T drive I use with TimeMachine and it has never had a problem.

Its USB chipset is:
FreeAgent :

Capacity: 1 TB (1,000,204,884,992 bytes)
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1

Product ID: 0x3008
Vendor ID: 0x0bc2

Version: 1.38
Serial Number: 2HC015KJ
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Seagate
Location ID: 0xfa430000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 2

Richard, from my iNeo dock:

Product ID: 0x5106
Vendor ID: 0x174c (ASMedia Technology Inc.)
Version: 0.01
Serial Number:
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: ASMedia
Location ID: 0x26200000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 0

I have two other USB drives as well that do not auto eject.

Again, if you guys really want to solve this problem then have in mind that Firewire cabling has the same issue as some of you who are having it with USB drives. So, the problem is not USB. *The problem is with USB and FW connections.*

I have yet to observe a problem with a drive on FW yet.

I bought a dual-dock Thermaltake dock model ST0014U "Blac X Duet" from Canada Computers to replace my iNeo dock.

I wrote ~500G of files of various sizes to my MyBook Pro FW800 2T in RAID1 with zero errors or auto-ejects, that was reading from the Thermaltake.

Now I'm testing writing the same glob back to the Thermaltake. I'll post results and its chips when done.

I spoke with Applecare and we did some diagnostics and determined it wasn't the hardware and was a software issue.

I have done a complete clean reinstall, reset everything up to my liking, new settings blah blah .. no issues at all.

Plug in my iPhone to re-setup & sync with iTunes as a final step (plus USB into hub) and get all my external drives disconnecting like a frenzy on and off & my phone too. Grrrrrreat!

I am convinced it is a USB software issue. Just wish I knew how to fix it because it's killing my drives, my time, my sanity & my peace of mind that my files are safe.

here's another possibility. Just before I did the iPhone sync I finished adding all the OS updates and saw that one of the updates was a Java update. I nearly unticked it, because it sparked my interest as I remember seeing lots of errors etc for Java when I did a repair disk permissions previously before the clean OS reinstall.

Could the problem have come with the latest Java update?

Richard,
You can test, but I know what I'm talking about. My self powered, brand new, FW connected drive is being ejected all the time. I have changed the cables, I have change the ports, I have used FW hub, I have used directly FW plug on my PowerBook Pro, I have daisy chained through another drive, I did not copy anything onto it, I have put my drive through OnyX, TechTool Pro 5... - Nothing solves the problem. The longest period that my drive has stayed on was for few days when it was daisy chained. Otherwise it usually disappears in one day.

Please do not think it's only USB, because its not only USB. It's Firewire too.

It would be relief to many if we can narrow it down only to a specific Mac, or specific OS version, or specific drive brand, or copying, or size, or USB - but is NOT. What else then it can be except the OS system which did not solve this problem for the last 2 years.

What some people's posts are saying is not logical. In nearly all computer problems there is a pattern. Find the pattern and you find the problem.

So far, the only pattern I have found is one particular USB chip maker.

I just concluded a test with my new Thermaltake Black-X. It had one non-ejection error writing ~500 Gs. Here are its chip specs.

Capacity: 1 TB (1,000,204,886,016 bytes)
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk2
Product ID: 0x2352
Vendor ID: 0x152d (JMicron Technology Corp.)
Version: 1.00
Serial Number: 9BDAFFFFFFFF
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: JMicron
Location ID: 0xfa200000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 2
Partition Map Type: MBR (Master Boot Record)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Volumes:
MEDIA:
Capacity: 1 TB (1,000,204,853,760 bytes)
Available: 159.63 GB (159,625,150,464 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: NTFS
BSD Name: disk2s1
Mount Point: /Volumes/MEDIA

NOTE: The target drive was formatted for NTFS. This test was also of the new Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x) native support for this format. I'm using the Open Source Preferences panel to auto-enable NTFS write support. Its possible the one error I had is related to NTFS or the new driver for it.

The drive did not eject - it was a permission error - and I was able to continue the write test.

Please post what USB or FW chipsets you have in your drives to help find the pattern! (also note whether they worked or not)

Please don't test by hooking through a hub! Having a USB hub adds too much complexity. Keep it simple.

Java does not interact with any particular hardware unless you run some software written in Java that wants to access USB or FW. So, unless you have some software that does that, I don't think its relevant. But good to post your observation! And I would not delete it, I could be wrong!