External hard drive ejects on sleep

My 2013 Retina M.B.P keep ejecting external drives as well

I'm OSX 10.9.4.

One WD drive is my Time Machine b/up .

The other is LaCie with my iTunes music library.

I have always left them 'permanently' plugged in to my MacBookPro.

I have installed the MOUNTAIN app, but it made no difference . It's Driving me crazy.

Wondering if JETTISON app. some people on the forum talk about is worth trying.

It is sometimes very hard to remount the drives. I have to open Disk Utility and mount them if they are recognized.

Otherwise I can sometimes get them to appear if I restart.

I have repaired permissions and run AppleJack.

Also attached to MBP are Wired keyboard, and Apple 24" Cinema Display, DVD/CD drive and iPhone charger

I'm worried I will loose my music and Time Machine backup due to all the ejecting and restarting causing corruption issues.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Laurie

It looks like there are no updates to this for a few months, wondering if a solution is found. Just bought a brand new MBPro Retina 15.4 inch. Maxed specs. Have a USB 3 drive for normal use, and a 8TB WD Raid for Time Machine Backups (thunderbolt). The thunderbolt time machine drive ejects on sleep almost every night, or long day away. Tried all the simple solutions/settings to no avail.

Have any solutions been found?

I have the same problem with one of my external drives but not both.

I have a relatively new imac 27" from late 2013, 2 external Western Digital USB drives hooked directly into the back of the imac. One is dedicated to Time Machine backups and has no problems. The other one is just file storage, and it is the one that disconnects at sleep. It always appears mounted properly, however, and other than the error message on wakeup, I have no problems with it. It does not disconnect while the system is awake. The message is disconcerting, however, because if I experience data loss to this bug, it will be devastating.

The machine came with Mavericks but I upgraded to Yosemite and the problem persists.

I have been trying a utility called "Mountain" from appgineers.de. It looks pretty promising so far. I haven't seen any improper disk ejection since installing it. The one glitch that I have seen is that the most recent version, which is 1.6, is not functioning at all on my Mountain Lion drive. Version 1.5.3 is perfect, however. The developer is aware of the issue, and says it is specific to Mountain Lion.

So it looks like the best one can hope for in this is Eric's suggestion from back in 2012. I just tried it and it worked for me. It would be great if the OP would note that Eric answered his question so that the myriad people who suffer from this same issue could find the solution more readily.

Here's Eric's post:

Eric.Sep 1, 2012 2:13 AM Re: External hard drive ejects on sleep
Re: External hard drive ejects on sleepin response to iamapple

With an administrator account (either GUI or from the command line), try this command in Terminal:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool YES

You then need to *restart* your Mac to have the command take effect, and test.

That command sets the system-wide default to mount external HDs on startup and unmount on shutdown. The default behavior is to mount on GUI login, and unmount on GUI logout. Sleep functions as a type of GUI logout, which unmounts your external HDs.

Works for me with Firewire and Thunderbolt HDs. This mount on GUI login behavior for me goes way back to 10.2 or 10.3, so it's usually a command (or variants depending on the OS) I run as part of the setup of any of my Macs.

This happens for me also, iMac 21.5" mid-2011.

Turns out, it seems to depend on the hard disk. I have an old Western Digital My Book, which I used as Time Machine in my ancient Mac Pro mid-2006, and it survives the sleep with no problem. I took the old internal hard drive, 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda, and put it in an Deltaco Enclosure, and it just doesn't wake up - I get the "disk improperly ejected" whenever I wake the computer up. Both are connected to the computer directly via USB.

I did the "sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool YES" thing but it doesn't help - it just makes waking up from sleep excruciatingly slow - also it looks like my keyboard connected to my USB hub doesn't wake up properly.

Here's the info for my drives. The Time Machine one works with the sleep, the Ammotus one doesn't. Go figure. I'm trying to get them to mount on the same USB bus, not sure if that solves anything - frustrating.

Storage:

Time Machin

Time Machine Backups:

Available: 7,12 GB (7 120 883 712 bytes)

Capacity: 999,86 GB (999 860 912 128 bytes)

Mount Point: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups

File System: Journaled HFS+

Writable: Yes

Ignore Ownership: No

BSD Name: disk1s2

Volume UUID: C8A2E531-9648-3B4F-A080-45D0808B2D21

Physical Drive:

Media Name: WD My Book Media

Protocol: USB

Internal: No

Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)

S.M.A.R.T. Status: Not Supported

Ammotus:

Available: 1,04 TB (1 042 736 279 552 bytes)

Capacity: 1,5 TB (1 499 957 936 128 bytes)

Mount Point: /Volumes/Ammotus

File System: Journaled HFS+

Writable: Yes

Ignore Ownership: No

BSD Name: disk2s2

Volume UUID: A4AA462A-215A-3A54-9998-0D32D5F8E647

Physical Drive:

Media Name: ST315005 41AS Media

Protocol: USB

Internal: No

Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)

S.M.A.R.T. Status: Not Supported

It's very interesting that your old WD enclosure works, while an enclosure that I assume is newer does not. One thing to try is using a different USB cable with the drive that is misbehaving.

Other than that, you could give the "Mountain" app a try. On my systems, it has so far stopped the improper disk ejection problem in Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite. http://appgineers.de/mountain/

I've been using it for a couple of months. The main glitch I've found is that you need to turn it off when you are running a Mac OS installer, because it seems to interfere with part of the resource mounting/unmounting process. You also need to turn it off, for the same reason, when you are using DiskmakerX (or presumably Disk Utility) to create a bootable OS installer on a flash drive. This is minor compared to the constant disk ejection annoyance that Apple is apparently never going to fix.

BTW the disk ejection problem never happens in Snow Leopard on my systems.

Yes, the old WD was bought in the previous decade, the new one two months ago. I installed Mountain and it doesn't seem to help with the problem. I tried several combinations from the Preferences / Advanced / Automation but no joy so far - if you could tell the exact settings that worked for you, I'd be grateful.

Also, after doing the sudo trick and switching the USB cables around, the whole wake from sleep is now excruciatingly slow. I can keep tapping on the mouse, space bar and the power button for 30 seconds before the machine makes even a peep. Any idea why this would be? Yep, I did the command line with NO in the end and restarted a couple of times, but no joy.

I have "Mount unmounted volumes on wake from sleep" checked, as well as "Unmount external volumes on sleep (experimental)" checked. The result you are getting makes me wonder if there is an issue with your new drive enclosure.

I'm not seeing any slowdown in waking from sleep. I've tried a couple of drives, depending on what needs to be backed up, but the one that is always connected is a run-of-the-mill 3TB Seagate external connected to a CalDigit USB3/eSATA card. Prior to installing Mountain, it got improperly ejected in every installed OS but Snow Leopard. Other drives in better enclosures behave the same as the Seagate.

I just bought a Late 2015 iMac 5K and am using my 3TB WD My Book drive. Should also mention that I am using OS X El Capitan. Every time my Mac awakes from sleep, my external drive dismounts. To get it to mount again, I typically have to unplug both the USB 3.0 connection and power adapter. A simply unplug of the USB cable is not sufficient. I have not played around with updating firmware yet, but I may give that a go...once I figure out how to do it. Also want to mention the drive is formatted NTFS. I cannot afford to move 1+ TB of information to a temporary location so that I can format as Journaled. Also, NTFS is needed for my Windows VM. Thoughts?

My issue will most likely be fixed with a firmware upgrade. For any WD My Book users, your firmware is out of date and needs to be updated. Go to page 3 of this PDF for release notes: http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/Mac_Univ_FW_Updater_Release_Notes_v3.2.4.4 C.pdf

I have the same problems intermittently with two external TB LaCie drives.

Mac Pro late 2013 running OS X 10.11.3

In the morning when waking the machine I occasionally find notices one or both drives "Improperly ejected". Sometimes the drives have remounted, sometimes not and I need to recycle power to remount. Happens about every other day. One of the drives occasionally ejects and remounts repeatedly during the night, leaving a long string of "Improperly ejected" notices on the desktop.

What up?

Thank you for a very comprehensive answer.

I tried this and it didn't work.

I have a LaCie 500 GB USB external hard drive ( https://raoulpop.com/2007/12/14/hardware-review-lacie-500-gb-external-hard-drive / ).