Q: External hard drive ejects on sleep

I have seen some posts of folks who seem to have the issue resolved but I believe this is for an external drive connected via USB. If any of you out there get the issue resolved with a network drive, please let us know! Thank you.

I think I've read about every response and idea on this post, but have yet to see a solution for my setup. I'm running an OWC Mercury Elite Pro drive as a Time Machine backup by way of Firewire 800 on a brand new Macbook Pro 13" running OS 10.8.2. It disconnects every time the computer goes to sleep leaving me with the error message of "disconnecting it improperly". In case I missed something...any ideas how to fix this?

Do you have the option of trying a USB connection rather than FW. While not 100% there does seem to be some better success when USB connected rather than Firewire.

Andrew

I have 3 different makes of USB drives connected. It makes no difference on my setup

All the usb drives are being ejected when the computer sleeps? Are there any firmware issues that could affect one drive vs another?

Yeah all the drives eject. Not aware of any firmware issues. Has only occurred since updating to Mountain Lion

Ironically, I had an older MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion with none of these issues. It's only the new MBP that has the issue!

How old is old? I have a mid-2010 15" i7 2.66Ghz MacBook Pro I had issues with. I thought it went away but I experienced the ungraceful eject again recently. I'm not 100% sure, but it seems if I "let" it go to sleep, I have issues, but if I "put" it to sleep, it seems to behave better. I have a LaCie 2TB USB drive.

It was an early 2008 MBP and it worked perfectly on ML 10.8.2. No issues with ejecting drives or anything.  I'll give a try and put the computer to sleep!

I was having the "eject error" message awhile ago, but the problem has somehow been solved.  Apple maintained it wasn't an Apple problem.  Drobo said it was a problem with one of the hardrives in the Drobo unit.  I replaced the HD and the problem still exsisted.  Then Drobo said that the Drobo unit must be defective, and they sent me a new one.  Ever since I have not had any problems.  I'm connected using FW800.  I'm of the mind set that Apple realized this was a problem, and has made some minor tweeks in their updates, but haven't mentiond anything about it given that they had such a bad publicity hit with their Maps feature on the iPhone.  They wouldnpt want to admit there was a problem with their new OS too!  I realize this doesn't help you guys who are still having problems, but wanted to share my experience.  I have observed that ML seems to very sensative regarding the types of hardward, such as the size and type of HD's, and or the configuration unit they are being used in.  In my case the problem was with Drobo, maybe the problem is with the HD unit compatability and ML, rather than ML?

I've just purchased my first ever mac. This ejecting of my external drive is driving me mad. All of my USB drives are ejected. Different manufactures, different enclosures. Same issue.

I ran Disk Utility to fix permissions, and it looked like that had fixed it for a while. Not so. Since then I have downloaded & (re-)installed iTunes without improvement.

I tried the Disk Permissions route too...no luck. I have an OWC Mercury Elite Pro drive connected as a TM backup drive via Firewire 800. I just emailed OWC to see if they know anything or maybe have a solution worked out. If so, maybe it will help for other drives too.

how did u do that?

Here's a solution you can try, recommended to me by an Apple Tech:

Under System Preferences, go to Energy Saver and deselect "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" and lock it.

However....that solved the problem only for about a month.Then my external hard drive started ejecting every 20 minutes. I bought a new drive and...no more problems. It was worth $129 to end the problem and the headaches.