Why does my Thermaltake Silver River 5G USB 3.0 External Drive keep disappearing?

Hi All,

Having major problems with a Thermaltake Silver River 5G USB 3.0 External Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153160). External drive contains Western Digital 2TB drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136891). I'm running Mac OS X 10.8.3 on a 2012 Mac Mini.

Basically, I can plug-in or turn the drive on, it mounts fine. Can run a Time Machine Backup. At some point (and I think it's when the computer goes to sleep), the drive hangs and I can no longer access it. Time Machine will hang on "Looking for backup disk". Drive will still appear in Finder, but I cannot "Eject" it. I've also tried to do a "umount -f" on it from the Terminal. Disk Utility still "sees" the device and the disk (partition?), but can't run a repair.

The only way I've found to fix this problem is to reboot the machine. I've crawled through the System log, but I don't see anything that points to a problem.

What else can I check? I'm have no idea if it's the hard drive, the external USB enclousure, Mac OS X, or the Mac Mini that's the problem. Please let me know if there is more information I could provide to help solve this problem. It's really frustrating!!!

Thanks!

-Ben

Mac mini, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on Mar 21, 2013 7:52 PM

17 replies

dmcg

Level 3

779 points

Jul 10, 2013 11:11 AM in response to vthree

I’ve bought a number a number of external enclosures from OWC. The best 2 enclosures for the money IMHO:

1. The light and sturdy potable enclosure for MacBooks. On-The-Go Pro at http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

2. The nice looking and robust OWC Mercury Elite Pro for desktop use. Go to http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB

You can easily install your favorite hard drives. I would use USB 3 and/or Firewire 800 connections skipping the Thunderbolt drives until Apple gets faster external HD speeds from Thunderbolt. USB 3 is actually as fast or faster than Thunderbolt at this stage. It also runs cooler and cost lest. In a year or two from now, Thunderbolt should be able to deliver on it’s speed promises for external HDs.

Message was edited by: dmcg

jfyeh

Level 1

0 points

Nov 18, 2013 10:55 AM in response to bmnave

I had the same problem with my Thermaltake USB 3.0 version connected to my 2010 Mac mini(USB 2.0 only ports). I had an extra enclosure with an extra hard drive and tried all different combinations, the problem followed the Thermaltake enclosure. You see a ton of read errors in the kernel.log file.

I FIXED the issue by using a Belkin USB hub between the Thermaltake enclosure and the Mac mini. Never times out now.

I think tried this on a 2012 Macbook pro, this has USB 3.0 ports and it's fine.

So the problem is some reading/compatibility issue with the Thermaltake and any directly connected USB 2.0 machine.

I had the Mercury Elite pros and moved to the Thermaltake because of heat issues. Got over 130 degree F in the Mercury. It's always around 80 in the Thermaltake. The lack of active fans is really a drawback to the OWC enclosure's, otherwise the desgin is wonderful.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Why does my Thermaltake Silver River 5G USB 3.0 External Drive keep disappearing?