Optical bay SSD get ejected.

Especially with third-party SSD drives, Enabling TRIM using something like TRIM Enabler is very important. Despite what one manufacturer says, "it can't hurt".

You will also need to run Disk Utility (Repair Disk) from a different drive that has TRIM Enabler or equivalent installed. This produces the very satisfying message: "Trimming Unused Blocks" and the program pauses for up to a minute while the junk is removed. Drive speed can increase substantially after this operation, because the drive is no longer drowning in deleted data blocks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

The drive may need a Garbage Collection cycle to set itself right.

What sometimes happens is an SSD drive runs so low on free blocks it cannot function, and appears to go comatose. After a round (sometimes several rounds) of internal Garbage Collection, the drive has consolidated enough free space and can just barely "come back to life".

The automatic Garbage Collection inside the SSD is allowed to happen when the SSD drive is completely idle. Leave your Mac powered on, running anything (including just the Alt/Option Boot screen), but NOT accessing the SSD drive. After about 20 minutes, the drive will notice that it is idle and start garbage collection. The time may vary by manufacturer, but overnight will certainly do it.

Apple only supports TRIM on Apple-brand devices, so of course it reports that Apple-TRIM is not supported. That is why a Third-party Utility is required to turn on the feature.

The amount of free space indicated by Mac OS X has NOTHING to do with anything related to an SSD. It is only accurate for Rotating drives.

Without TRIM, Mac OS X simply adds deleted data blocks to its internal free list --- It does not delete the data Blocks and does NOT notify the drive that these blocks are free. The drive continues to track every data block that EVER contained any data, since MacOS does not send down the TRIM commands needed for the SSD to discard those deleted data blocks.

Please take a quick look at the wikipedia article I cited -- I am not making this stuff up.

I do not believe you have a power problem. There have been essentially no reports of power problems when using drives in the optical Bays, even when both graphics aux power cables are in use.

Spontaneous unmounting indicates the drive has a problem. SSD drives from OWC have a long warranty. I suggest you send it back to the manufacturer for replacement.

hello, sorry to bother here, I have this same problem with a macbook pro late 2011. I have an ssd on the main drive space and another on the optical drive bay....everything was a bliss until about 2 weeks when I ejected a USB device ...it was just a pen drive transporting files I really needed, and then my ¨storage ssd¨ started ejecting out of the blue...well not out of the blue maybe... I mean maybe someone knows something about this problem All I was using was: Cubase 7 usb licencer on one usb port, then a regular usb hub with: a usb keyboard, and a USB external drive where I was ocassionally farming files I needed on a project that was on the main drive....another ssd. I think this time the problem migth be that I was using the second ssd for the video of this project I was working on. The video is very heavy, about 30 gigs and it was in the second ssd.... well...maybe someone reads me and says ...hey you can lock the drive or disable the optical drive ejecting capability...or do it like this or just go and get a new bigger main ssd....sorry

thanks for your help and hope this is usefull for Jack Aksan too of course

modiolo-

Using TRIM Enabler?

--Yes, the drive has some wacky hardware problem

--No, re-read the posts above and install and enable TRIM, to avoid being back here again soon. And when it is installed, and you run Disk Utility (Repair disk) on that drive, you will see a very satisfying "Trimming unused blocks" and a pause of up to a minute or more while it removes all that stuff.

NB> You cannot ( Repair Disk ) the drive you are booted from, so you may need to Install TRIM Enabler AGAIN on your secondary system drive and run the repair that way.

Oh my go.....you said it on the first answer, I had worked all night on other computer ocassionally checking this one...so it was almost as if it was on overnight!!!

well I have to enable the trim option...or install trim enabler ....

also, I have to say I may need to update firmware for that ssd. Do you know if that processs erases all the disk?

also, I have to cross my fingers to have the luck of having that disk not magically ejected off the grid as its happening lately

Im sorry I am asking this much.

Ill check trim enabler now, thanks

I may need to update firmware for that ssd. Do you know if that processs erases all the disk?

It is not INTENDED to erase the drive, but it may do it anyway.

You cannot afford to take that risk. Backup first.

I have a SSD in a third party optical drive replacement bay on a mac mini late 2009. I also had the problem that my ssd was ejected spontaneously.

solution that helped me: in system preferences --> energy saver--> uncheck option "put hard disks to sleep when possible"

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

...And when it is installed, and you run Disk Utility (Repair disk) on that drive, you will see a very satisfying "Trimming unused blocks" and a pause of up to a minute or more while it removes all that stuff...

Last night, I deleted a 16GB Windows 8.1 preview virtual machine from my TRIM enabled Crucial M500 960GB boot drive and shortly thereafter shut down. This morning, after reading this thread, I figured I'd try the forced TRIMMing process from another TRIM enabled boot drive and was surprised to see it complete in well under 5 seconds. Since the drive wasn't heavily used between that deletion and shutdown, would I be correct in thinking that GC based on blocks having been identified as free by TRIM could have been done immediately if the SSD wasn't really busy? The drive has about 20% overprovisioning as well as plenty of free space, so the cleanup wasn't urgent. Or, can erasure of 16GB worth of blocks really go that fast?

BTW, I think this would also be a perfect example of the advantages of enabling TRIM whenever possible because without it, those 16GB of deleted data would have to be put somewhere else for erasure to take place, thus decreasing speed and increasing wear.

Need TRIM installed on the system SSD and it will do its additional maintenance during idle periods that B/GC does not do, AND it helps if you had done a lot (and did not have trim installed, such as forgot and installed a lot of software or during initial clone) to also use DU and invoked TRIM ( meaning other than Recovery Mode because that won't have it).