Q: External hard drive ejects on sleep

Mr. DeBoBo, I believe you have wandered into the wrong discussion thread.

First of all, I'm not using USB. It's an eSATA drive connected through a LaCie Thunderbolt adapter, which I paid almost $200 for. It has never worked as advertised.

Second, I am an IT support professional at a major research institution. It's not something so obvious as a loose cable, but thanks for trying to help.

I have read through this post with interest. It is a problem I have been trying to resolve for ages.

I have an iMac and a Mac Pro, connected to a network with two Netgear NAS drives and one Stora. I mount volumes for folders on all of these drives, 12 in total.

When the iMac sleeps the mounted volumes do not eject.

When the Mac Pro sleeps all mounted volumes eject.

Both Macs are on OSX 10.9.2. Both are running Windows 7 under Parallels 9, but this does not seem to be relevant.

If it is an issue with OSX then it has to be with some setting that is capable of being changed. I just don't have a clue.

I was also having this issue.  Then in the Power settings I saw an option "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" that was enabled.

I disabled that and my problems with flaky external drives went away. 

Tanvir, as mentioned in an earlier post, that solution worked for me in Mac OS 10.8, but it broke again in 10.9.

Does anyone think this affects Time Machine backups?

I am having the same issue of my external hard drive (1 TB My Passport) giving me an "improperly ejected" message in the morning after my MacBook Pro sleeps.

However, my main fear is that that my Time Machine backup might get corrupted with this issue.  For example, if the drive is improperly ejected while Time Machine is doing a backup.

Does anyone think this is a concern?  Or is this only happening when the computer is not doing anything, and therefore are the backups safe?

Thanks,

-Lee

Yes it is a real concern.  Over the past year or more (the ejects on sleep problem has vexed me for a long time) I have had to reformat my external Time Machine drive three times. Very very annoying. One reason I also backup to the cloud with CrashPlan.

Alan

Alan,

Was this because you got a notification that the Time Machine back up failed?  Or did you just decide to reformat the drive out of concern?

Just wondering as I was thinking of reformating and rebacking up my computer after I got the "disk improperly ejected" notification last night. 

I'd rather be safe than sorry, so any concern and I'll go ahead and do that.

-Lee

Time Machine could not be accessed b/c the hard disk was corrupted. The only choice I had was to wipe it. If you don't need to (you continue to access the disk and Time Machine is working) there is no reason or advantage to reformat it. Just beware, there is a chance that sometime this will happen. Just when I thought the problem was solved and it was "safe" this happened. I cannot give you any rhyme or reason for when (or eve if).

Just want to be reply 428 and say I have the same problem..

I run OS 10.9.2

Macbook pro (late 2011)

Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt raid, Cinema LED display daisy chained through Pegasus.

Old cinema HD display conected throug display link (USB)

And 2 WD drives daisychained through Firewire 800 port.

When the computer goes to sleep, it ejects only the pegasus (not the firewire drives) and gives me the inciorrect ejected drive warning when I wake it up. I have to powercycle the pegasus to get it to remount.

Sometimes I also find in the morning the the comuter has restarted itself.

No options in ebergy saver make a difference and Jettison works in that it ejects the drives (and removes the incorrect eject warning), but it does not re-mount the Pegasus when I wake up the computer, I still need to power cycle. (It does re-mount the firewire drives)

I had this problem before, but then went away (I assumed with the last software update) But I just got my logic board replaced and the problem is back.

I really hope we will get a fix in the next software update..

Danielle

Thanks Alan, good to know I don't have to do it every time this happens.

I have fixed my problem!

Disable the power management in the pegasus unit.

In terminal type: promiseutil

At the cliib> prompt, type: ctrl -v

You will see in the controller settings "PowerManagement: Enable" If "PowerManagent: enable", please follow the steps below to disable Power Management.

At the cliib> prompt, type: ctrl -a mod -s "powermanagement=disable"

My issue is along these same lines.

I am using a Fantom External USB 3 HD Enclosue.

I used Terminal to do the following:

Unmount/remount the HD no problem

Unload/reload the USB mass storage kext

Everything behaves as expected.

If I unmount the drives and then unload the kext and put the computer to sleep then wake it back up and reload the kext it won't see the drive at all. I must physically unplug and replug the drive in. This is the case also if I just unmount the drive and sleep the machine and wake it back up without manually unloading/reloading the kext.

If I plug the drive into a USB 2 hub and do the same process it behaves properly. So there appears to be an issue with the way it is reacting to USB 3?

Are people having issues with both USB 2 and 3?

USB3 and Sleep is a problem with Mac's period.  That goes for powered external drives as well non-powered, although not as bad as the ones that are USB3 powered.  I noticed after waking up my computer the WiFi connection is gone on non-powered USB3 drives.

On powered USB3 the drive does not un-mount but there's a WiFi blip.

On USB powered USB3 drives the drive will un-mount after waking from sleep and WiFi is gone.  In my case (late 2012 MBP w/USB3 and Mid 2009 MBP w/USB2) I have to restart or re-launch Finder the computer in order to re-mount the external USB3 drive.

All USB2 drive either powered or non powered have NO issues.......in my situation.

Did you try preventing hard disks from sleep option in the power saving dialouge?

System prefrences>Energy saver>...uncheck Put hard disks to sleep when possible

Put your system to sleep with the external hard disk plugged in

Wake your system, See if the hard disk is still showing or not.

*for Macbooks see which option you like to have for your battery.

Shutting down hibernate via Terminal does not solve the problem. I've tried.  Yes, a change was made but the issue effects prior to hibernate. Normal sleep is the issue and, I suspect, power is shut off to the ports and Apple is not bothering ejecting drives before that and, not remembering drives if one manually ejects prior to shutdown. A small 3rd party developer offers Jettison. It sorta works most of the time, occasionally will not remount. That's why I'm now running 24/7 on the inky current year Mac we have.

This is an Apple problem. Perhaps a result of an EU initiative to save energy which Apple had to respond to. As far as the EU initiative goes, I've now set my computer to never sleep if I have scheduled jobs coming, which is pretty much always. As far as Apple goes, I'm in my replace 3 computers year and after the newest MBA, the other two replacements have been put on hold until this issue is corrected. Apple has been informed but I doubt it will do any good. We have new features coming after all. Reliable I/O is hardly exciting.