my macbook pro keeps ejecting my seagate external hard drive

For what it's worth, I'd purchased a 2TB Seagate Freeagent Desktop drive a couple of years ago at a pretty good price. I immediately got the problem with automatic ejections. I tried Seagate's recommendations and fixes all to no avail. I tried the device on a variety of different Macs with no luck. I could get it to stay connected if I ran a Windows OS under Parallels and logically connected the USB port from the drive straight through to Windows.

Anyway, I finally gave up on the stupid box and stuck it in a drawer as a hopeless case. A couple of weeks ago, I'd upgraded my iMac to Mavericks and thought I'd give it a try again when I happened to notice it sitting there gathering dust. Of course, it didn't work; still the same auto-eject business. BTW, I'd killed off the Seagate drive kext by this time.

So, I finally just took the internal Seagate Barracuda LP drive out of the enclosure and popped it into a StarTech.com naked drive dock that I have. No problems. As PlotinusVeritas says, it's not the drive, it's the electronics inside the box. I had an old enclosure for 3.5 ATA drives, so I'll have to get one for SATA. No biggy.

The question in my mind is if Seagate must be aware that their sleep-mode electronics is and has been incompatible with Macs for this long, why don't they just fix it? There must be something wrong with the marketing team in that company since I can't believe that the engineers haven't spoken internally about the real source of the problem.

Anyway, now I have a functional Seagate drive... It's just in another company's box.

In general:

- If you have an external drive any brand do not install any software, 'smart' software or 'necessary' software that came with it. If you did, uninstall completely and restart. (I am taliking about macs, not pc's, although I do not do it there too).

- A Firewire drive connection is not the same as USB connection. So you can not compare issues on the connections when not the same.

- @Allan Angus: if you have an internal strartdrive with the Seagate name you should not remove the Seagate kext, unless you have/had Seagate software installed.

- If you have an external disk built in a enclosure yourself, make absolutely sure that it is a good enclosure, because the sata to USB connector is often crap (Plotinus).

- @Duplic8tor: Normally the Seagate Momentus XT works exactly as expected (as others do), but after installing any "recommended" software with it installed, and you probably have issue.

This was my problem for about 10 months now, after upgrading to the late 2013 rMBP. I read in another thread, (which I can't find now) that someone deleted Google Drive and the problem was solved. I just wanted to share that this was also the case with me. Google Drive completely removed from OSX and now my external hard drive (Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1TB) has not improperly ejected for almost 24 hours. In the past it would eject after 1-2 hours max.

FWIW - I've recently ran into this issue on Yosemite with a WD 4 Terabyte External drive. I was able to resolve by disabling Spotlight from indexing the external drive.

My WD drive has been a rockstar for about 2 years, and I've never had this issue. It only recently started when I purchased a new external drive and started migrating my iTunes media from 4 terabyte drive to the new one. Both are connected directly to a mac mini via usb (no hub). If I wasn't copying data from the drive, I didn't have issues. So I'm assuming that somehow copying data from 1 drive to the new one, and having Spotlight enabled, overtaxed the system somehow causing the random ejections.

FWIIW: as long as nothing changes on the disk that is activated for Spotlight, there is no indexing necessary, thus Spotlight does not use resources. As soon as you start copying files to the disk, Spotlight starts to index the disk for changes, and this can take a serious amount of resources, see it happen in Activity Monitor.

Personally I do not index any other drive than the Main Startup drive and the Drive where I have additional data for use (like photo-, music-, movie libraries, and other large projects). Backup drives I do not index.

Lex

Oh, well yes you must be trying to do some weird obscure off-shoot operation that isn't part of normal Apple computing. Oh, what? You're doing a Time Machine backup? Well, yes, Apple produces Time Machine, and technically supports it, but you must be doing something wrong. Your cable's bad. Your HDD is bad. So is everyone else's cable and HDD. Oh, what? It might be something wrong with Apple's hardware? First of all, that's impossible because we all know Apple doesn't make mistakes. Second, you're out of warranty so BUY ANOTHER MAC! 😉

Found it here: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207851en

2.

1. Download the FreeAgent Go sleep disable utility's enclosed DMG file to your desktop.

Seems to be working.

I have to constantly run the Disk Repair in Disk Utilities for my 1 TB WD. I just want to set it & live without random drive ejections.

send your drive back to seagate if it is still under warranty.

I did this and got back a non ejecting one.

good luck all

How old is the Seagate? It is under warrantee probably, return it and choose another Brand, for example Toshiba or so. My Seagate (same model) was nothing but trouble, and I got my money back.