Q: External hard drive ejects on sleep

No change with ejecting drives after sleep with 10.8.2, but my Mac Pro appeared to wake up more quickly than with 10.8.0 or 10.8.1.

Well interestinger and interestinger said the cat - or some such from Alice in Wonderland. While still on USB the LaCie / MountainLion 10.8.2 combo decided to self eject just now. The only perceived difference I noticed is that the iMac seemed to take a while longer than normal to wake. So perhaps, as some others have noted, the problem is related in to how ML wakes up the system and not a specific device, connection mode or manufacturer.

Will swap back to FW over the weekend and see if that makes the problem more regular.

I also suspect the problem is in the area around PowerNap, they must have changed a lot of the power management code for 10.8

It's the weirdest thing that my 2 WD Studio Duo drives on FW haven't unmounted once while the tiny FW SSD does it all the time...

Hope they fix that soon - worst OS related isse I had in 30 years of Apple products.

I disconnected my Drobo S unit, and connected a La Cie 2 Big drive via FW 800, not using it as a back up drive and not using Time Machine.  Everything was fine when I awakened the computer this morning!  No error message, and the disk was still mounted!  So, is it Time Machine, or Drobo, or as fkoehn said, is it something to do with power management?  I have now disconnected the LaCie drive, and reconnected the Drobo S via FW, but have turned Time Machine off.  We'll see, I'll keep you posted.

The external hard drive that I'm having issues with is not my backup drive. It is not affiliated with Time Machine at all. In fact, my Time Machine drive (FW) is not affected.

What type of drive is it?  So far, the problems seem to have a theme related to the type of drive.  Whether it is the drive enclosure, or the actual types of drives within the closures.  My Drobo S has 5 WD 2TB drives in it, and the LaCie has 2 Hatachi 1TB drives.

MIne is a LaCie 2TB. I'm not sure if it's one or two drives or even what type of drive is inside.

Confirmed. 10.8.2 made no difference.

I am having no issues with my Drobo S connected via USB. I have tried it used as backup with Time Machine, and with time machine truned off and in both modes there is no error message, and the disk remains mounted! I'm tempted to return to FW just to confirm the experiment.

I just spent an hour working with an Apple help desk technician on this same problem and here's the solution he suggested that's now working beautifully for me:

Go to System Preferences/Energy Saver. Deselect the box that says "Put hard disks to sleep when possible"

Oh, yeah, and click the lock closed when you're done.

Hi Little Nelle

Great to hear that this has fixed things for you. Unfortunately for many of us that had no positive effect. Did the Apple Help Desk person make any comment on Apple being aware of this issue and it being worked on by the development team?

Thanks

Andrew

I mentioned the large number of people having this problem and he didn't respond, just sort of poo-poohed my going to the talk forums for help, which have always solved my problems in the past, but not in this case.

Other things we did that may have also helped — reset the PRAM (with non-remote keyboard), turned off Time Machine and ejected it through Disk Utility (which restored the external hard drive icon), ejecting external hard drive through the Finder, disconnecting drive and then reconnecting. Disconnecting all devices, then reconnecting....

I don't think it has anything to do with the type of drive, since I'm seeing all sorts of manufacturers popping up. I'm using a LaCie.

Gotta love an arrogant support person ;-)

Thanks

So I have an case open with Apple support on this, the support person was incredibly nice and attempted to help but he had to pass the issue onto 'engineering' & it appears they refuse to admit this is a major problem all he got  back in terms of advice for me from them was to 'install firmware' for my external drives (never heard that in my life for a USB mass storage device). the other option was to completely reformat the drive and see if the problem returned.

Suffice to say no explicit drivers exist for my drive from the vendor, I did also reformat one of my drives (after having to move data off it), end result NADA, 10.8.2 solves nothing and setting the option for the drives not to sleep didn't solve a thing.

If anyone from Apple is listening, please stop trying to fob us off with bogus reasons why this is broken, my drives all worked fine on Lion & now I'm seeing issues on mulitple ML machines.

I suggest everyone raise this issue with Apple support, hopefully the volume may make them look seriously at this OS issue.