Disk not ejected properly

If the blue light is constantly on but the external drive is not in use and it sometimes seems to be running for a few seconds with flashing blue light, there is no message that the drive was removed improperly, and the blue light afterwards is again constantly on, and there was no loss of connection. It's just that for some reason the drive is doing something. No idea what.

I can't believe we're still discussing this issue.

I've seen this problem since I got my iMac (late 2013 model) last year. Having a bunch of older FW drives connected to my old MacMini, I tried to switch to USB3 on the new iMac I got. Sadly I immediately suffered with the Incorrectly Disconnected messages. I also found that some drives (older Seagates FWIW) also suffered with more serious issues, such as my main LightRoom photo collection would not allow me to write to the drive from LR at random intervals. I also found my Time Machine backup drive became corrupt after a couple of days use, with indications the drive had failed.

Most of my drives are in a four drive enclosure, so none are 'boxed' external drives. It does seem to be worse with Seagate drives though, as other brands seem to work much better. I tried a variety of solutions, from connecting direct to the iMac, and trying a couple of different powered hubs, and changing the cables (despite all being brand new). All to no avail.

In the end I gave up and bought the Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter (luckily the enclosure I bought had multiple connection options), and have had no issues at all, all drives have performed fine since (the only thing is the TB adapter is a little wiggly in the socket, and slight movement can cause a disconnect).

One or two things to try have perhaps come up in this thread, but I'm not sure how much trouble it's worth going too now I have a working solution. I spotted a few things that might relate to my setup, such as the Seagate drives, and using an APC BackUPS power unit, switching off sleep modes, and using Jettison etc. However, none of these seem to offer a genuine fix, nor do they all seem to offer a guarantee to work, and in some cases attempting to fix things could be expensive (replacing drives, hubs, cables and enclosures), but finding the right combination that *might* work is obviously pretty tricky.

There definitely seems to be something screwy with Apple's implementation of USB3 somewhere, and it does extend to more than just sleeping drives too. I found that my iMac was waking up randomly during the night, and mostly within a few seconds of putting it to sleep manually. I eventually found this was coming from a hub that I'd connected using a USB3 cable, although everything plugged in was USB2. Even an empty hub caused the wake up. I changed it to a USB2 cable on the same hub, and now all is well.

My only solution that works satisfactorily was to switch back to FW800 using the Thunderbolt adapter and abandon USB3 altogether.

I would switch to Thunderbolt drives, but the cost of these is so prohibitive to an enthusiastic home user.

Just one final FWIW, I did a bit of searching on this problem in the past, and it's not unique to Macs, but also affects Windows users too, so it would suggest an underlying problem with the USB3 protocol that's been difficult to work around, rather than a muck up by Apple. There have been historic precidences for this too, such as whether to use certain chipsets in PCi cards, or making sure you get Oxford chips in FW devices.

I've given up on Apple ever addressing this. I bit the bullet and bought two LaCie D2 thunderbolt drives to replace my two OWC Mercury Elite Pro USB3 drives. I have a LaCie Big thunderbolt drive and I never get the "disk not ejected properly" error with it. For me, at least, the problem seems to be limited to USB.

The error message does not appear if you don't put the mac to sleep. The instructions of LaCie are: whenever you want to put drives to sleep remove them from the desktop first.

The trouble also happens with a thunderbolt connection. Maybe there are different types of macs that react differently.

Yes, you are. Maybe it's a matter of AC or DC. LaCie told me that the Mac Pro is so good in energy saving that sometimes the drives 'think' the power is off, which causes this kind of problem.

The instructions from LaCie are: for putting the drives to sleep remove the disks from the desktop and push the blue button for one second, to shut it down push 4 seconds. Before, the thunderbolt first version and the firewire drives there was no such problem. You could simply put the mac to sleep and the drives would follow suit.

There is in fact no reason at all to put a Mac Pro with an SSD HD to sleep. Putting it to sleep will cause the mac to heat up somewhat as the fan stops working. So unless you want the mac to shut down completely, simply leave it 'running' and put the other devices to sleep (monitor, external drives).

It's not an elegant solution, but Apple and LaCie and other brands should have a technical talk about all this.

I do have a reason, unfortunately, to put my iMac to sleep: I do audio recording in my home office, and sometimes that requires a completely silent environment. The iMac is very quiet (it has a 512 GB SSD), but not completely silent.

I've been using Jettison for a while. It works flawlessly with the thunderbolt drives, not so much with the USB3. Once I get the LaCie D2s, I will try uninstalling Jettison because I don't recall ever getting the error message with the TB drives. I'll report back.

Yeah, not putting my Mac to sleep is not an ideal option really. I don't have an SSD in mine, and it is clear that this issue is only with USB3 attached drives. The same drives attached using a USB2 cable work perfectly. My enclosure has four bays, each with its own set of ports - USB3, FW800 and eSATA - I can use FW800 (using the TB-FW adapter from Apple), or connect using a USB2 cable and I have no issues whatsoever. If I use a USB3 cable, then it all kicks off. Same drives, same enclosure, same adapter cards, the only constant that causes issues is USB3.

Cheers

Andy

Yes, that's understandable, as always the old YMMV applies.

However the overall factor that is consistent in all the threads about this is USB3. There are of course always going to be the odd case where something different happens too. There are also a large proportion of users that have no trouble at all, if you compare the total number of OS X users to those complaining of issues.

You are probably right with your original statement, although I'd extend that to certain types of Mac and certain types of external drives, and the various combinations of each that are possible. In the main most seem to have no trouble with Thunderbolt drives, and not all USB3 drives are causing trouble. All we can do is observe what seems to be the most common factors.

In your case, being one of the very few with Thunderbolt trouble, I'd suspect it's more likely you have a Thunderbolt unit that is slightly off tolerances somewhere, or the drive fitted to it it possibly causing the problem. It's reasonably common to see the Seagate drive units being the more usual suspect in all of these troubles.

If you also check comments regarding the Thunderbolt adapters, it's very common to see these becoming disconnected physically. My experience of the TB-FW800 adapter is that it's a little wobbly in the socket, and the weight of the adapter and attached cable makes it quite prone to movement and a disconnect. On my iMac I found it definitely helps to route the cables through the hole in the stand, which prevents the movement more. If you're using a Laptop, or MacMini, where you can't secure the adapter properly, then I'd suspect the Thunderbolt issues you're having are more likely to do with that, rather than a similar problem to the USB3 issues.

Just suggestions mind, none of this is very certain.

Well, the situation is that the Mac Pro and the Thunderbolt2 LaCie drives are just out on the market. Not so many people have them. Fact is that LaCie advises everyone in their instructions to put the drives to sleep by removing them from the desktop, which is something completely new as far as LaCie drives is concerned. There must be a reason for that, and I assume it's this problem.

Hi I'm having this issue since I upgraded to Mavericks where almost every time I put my computers to sleep I get the "Disk not ejected propoerly" message and every disk but the system one is not mounted and cannot be found by Disk Utility.

I have a Mac Mini late 2009 and a Macbook Pro 15 mid 2009 and I'm having this issue in both machines. Never had any issues before in any of my machines, not in Leopard, Snow Leopard or Lion.

On my Mini I have two external USB drives and on my MBP I have a SSD, where the system is installed, and a HD (I replaced my optical drive with a bay to install the extra disk).

I researched the issue and found a couple of threads where people sugested to buy a 3rd party app that would unmount the disks at sleep and remount them at wake, but I think this shouldn't be a issue, since it never happened with any version of OSX I had used before.

Is anybody else having this issue as well? Is there any word from Apple on this subject? Can I hope for a fix?

Thanks

The initial poster has had this problem with an older USB2 MacBook already, and he points his upgrade to Mavericks as the culprit.

I have never had this issue with any of my USB2 Macs, but I began to have the DNEP issue with a USB3 MacBookPro and Moutnain Lion, after months of flawless operation with the same hardware.

With all the hardware configurations that were exposed until now who knew this issue, this discussion seems to be turning into circles with no way to determine whether it's a cable, USB chip, newer drives power saving protocol, bad hardware connection problem or anything else. Could it be that a software-upgrade applied to all late OS's initiated the problem?

I also want to add that I'm not tech savvy, and don't know what the program 'Jettison' is, nor what Thunderbolt has to do with this problem. Besides the two external discs, I've got my external CD/DVD drive, and a Satechi 3.0 usb hub attached to my mini as all my usb ports on the mini are in use. Is my no longer having this issue due to the fact I run a Mac mini?

FWIW I have had the problem with a Plugable USB 3 caddy that goes through a USB 3 powered hub.

I also have it with a OWC Mercury Elite Dual enclosure, which was Thunderbolt. In fact this just destroyed one of my volumes...couldn't repair it. Not happy. I have had "prevent sleep" on, but allowed screen sleep. Won't do that again. At least with the Plugable I didn't get data loss.

I also don't get the problem with flash thumbdrives, not does it happen with SSDs (there's one in my dual bay; the HDD crashed, the SSD didn't). Maybe it's a plot to get us all to buy flash storage....

Well it's been awhile since I commented on this problem but my Buffalo Thunderbolt 1tb drive is still working fine with no issues for almost a year now.

My OWC drive I had which had the problem was moved to my laptop and re-formatted for pc. And it's a little flaky there too! You would think Apple would

have fixed this by now. My iMac is running Yosemite and the Buffalo is hooked directly to usb port on the iMac. I put it to sleep all the time and haven't had

any problems with DNEP so far. Hope it keeps working.🙂

Every now and again I have a little look to see how the issue is progressing.

I have had most of the problems mentioned and tried (I think) most of the suggested fixes (Jettison etc).

The issue occurred with USB 3, Thunderbolt and also USB 2 (but only with powered drives). USB 2.0 "self" powered drives and both USB 3 and 2 Thumb drives are fine.

My problems were solved by removing a mains master multiplug with the "eco" facility to switch of several things when the main one was switched off.

Once my external drives were plugged into a separate mains supply I could then use the sleep facility.

The drives now power down and reawaken whenever my (iMac) does.

I haven't yet tried the iMac in the "eco" plug again with the drives in separate sockets to see what happens. I will eventually but it involves moving cupboards and crawling under desks etc so may be a while!

I presume the eco socket was "assuming" that because the iMac was drawing only a small amount of power it had been switched off and, consequently, switching off the other things as it was supposed too.

I think the whole issue is power related but have no idea how/why. The fact that usb low draw items like thumb drives seem unaffected seems to support this but I'm sure someone will have a different experience.

Still think apple ought to try to sort it out somehow but they do hate to admit that they've failed in any way.

In the instructions that come with the LaCie thunderbolt2 drives I read some advice in case of problems:

"Problem: I got an error message telling me that the hard drive has been disconnected

Q: Did it happen when the computer was coming out of sleep mode?

A: Simply ignore this message. The hard drive will remount to the desktop. LaCie hard drives conserve power by spinning down when you set your computer to sleep mode, and when the computer is awoken from sleep, it may not give the hard drive enough time to spin-up from its sleep mode."

Could this just be a minor problem, a mechanical drive that is too slow in awakening from sleep as compared to an SSD hard drive in the latest macs? But then, can we trust this? An error as serious as a drive that was not ejected properly, should be heeded.