USB Hard Drive Spontaneously Disconnects

Question

USB Hard Drive Spontaneously Disconnects

I am experiencing instances where my USB hard drive will become spontaneously disconnected, only to reconnect moments later.

At the moment that the hard drive becomes disconnected of its own accord, Mac OS X throws up a dialog, in which is written:

The disk was not ejected properly. If possible, always eject a disk before unplugging it or turning it off. To eject a disk, select it in the Finder and choose File > Eject. The next time you connect the disk, Mac OS X will attempt to repair any damage to the information on the disk.

Take a look at this snippet from my

kernel.log

, which I've posted at https://gist.github.com/1865168. At

10:42:02

, the drive disconnects. At

10:42:15

, it reconnects. As you can see, the error message at the moment the drive disconnects appears to be:

CoreStorageGroup::completeIORequest - error 0xe00002d9 detected for LVG "Untitled"

How can I stop this from happening? I have hope that this drive isn't experiencing damage, since one of the last lines in

kernel.log

is "journal replay done".

Here are some more details about my system:

USB Hub (2.0 MTT) into which the drive is plugged:

Product ID: 0x0201

Vendor ID: 0x1a40 (TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC.)

Version: 1.00

Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec

Location ID: 0x26200000 / 3

Current Available (mA): 500

Current Required (mA): 100

Other devices plugged into that hub:

Apple Keyboard (into which is plugged a Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball)
M-Audio MIDISport 2x2
Vantec NexStar USB Hard Drive Interface (the one that disconnects); vendor ID: 0x152d (JMicron Technology Corp.)
Another USB Hard Drive Interface; vendor ID: 0x05e3 (Genesys Logic, Inc.)

Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Feb 19, 2012 11:13 AM

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Answer 1

mveplus

Level 1

26 points

Nov 22, 2012 8:15 PM in response to Michael Sneider1

Thanks Michael,

Michael Sneider1 wrote:

For me, the solution has been to go to the Energy Saver control panel (system preferences) and uncheck "Put hard disks to sleep..."

This did not work for me. But your advice make me play with some other options...

I find out that can reproduce it always by start coping big amount of data ( 200GB ) put display screen in sleep mode by "SHIFT+CONTROL+EJECT" buttons then wait a 30 seconds and wake it up and type my user password, got this error right away! Syslog error.

My setup:

1.MacBookPro8.1, 13" Unibody i7/2.7/8GB/SSD256G+HDD500G in DVD internal case, MacOS X ML 10.8.2

System Preferences > Energy Saver > Power Adapter Tab > Computer sleep > Never; Display Sleep > 10min; Put Hard disk to sleep when possible > Unchecked ( Michael suggestion)

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Require password <IMMEDIATE> after sleep or screen saver begins, File Vault ON

System Preferences > Desktop and Screen Saver> Screen Saver > Start after > "10 min" changed to "Never" for test.

2.External RAID Orico 9528RUSI3 box with USB3+ESATA+1394A+B ports. Running in "normal" mode with single HDD WD 3TB RE4 (MODEL: WD3003FYYS).

3. HDD is formatted Mac OS Extended Journaled with file vault encryption 1.5TB + NTFS 1.5TB ( but tried other available file systems as well - the result was the same!)

I repeat the issue for USB connection and it does not happened in my particular case...

For me the problem was just over 1394B<>1394B for both Orico box ports. First I thought that the problem is Orico external box and 1394 Chip (TSB81BA3E G4), so I re-flow the chip and the connectors as well. It was not temperature problem either. And after HDD disconnects it was not connecting back as the first post describe, so there are different causes....

After disabling Screen saver it was able to complete the data write on the drive without issue.

If I was working on the MAC it never happened either, but only if I leave it for a while and screen saver kick in.

Disconnects does not happened if I'm only reading form the external HDD box.

So if I'm going to copy big amount of data then I turn Screen Saver OFF or just keep working on the MAC until it's done! I'm not sure weather is Screen Saver or MAC User/Password (lock/unlock) problem.

This is not best solution for me because I do use this drive for Time Machine backups as well, so I have to decide if I'm going to leave my MAC without screen saver or will have to accept interrupted TM backups form time to time.

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