Disk not ejected properly

Just to add to this... I can confirm I'm getting DNEP on two external drives (usb3) which are both Seagate, 1TB and 3TB (both plugged in directly to the mac). However, they don't disappear from the desktop or the sidebar, they both continue to function. I just get the message popping up every time the mac wakes from sleep.

iMac 27" retina bought new in Jan 2014. Yosemite 10.10.1.

Data was transferred from a Snow leopard iMac with Migration Assistant.

Incidentally, this new iMac will go to sleep even if it's running at a constant 97% cpu load rendering Cinema4D output to an external disk.

Something is wonky with the whole sleep business.

By the way caffiene in the terminal does keep my mac awake and allows renders to run overnight - not possible in the current yosemite because everything powers down to around 5 percent. Hugely annoying to check in the morning and only 7 frames are rendered. My full attention mac does it at 6 seconds per frame, not 2 hours. I digress. Although the mac is not entirely asleep, just very nearly because stuff got done, just incredibly slowly. What the **** is going on there?

I know CAFFIENE won't work for my seagate drives because they go to sleep if not called upon, and neither are mac formatted from the box. I formatted them as HFS as apple recommends.

Why would that matter about how they are seen by OSX?

This is exactly what I hated about Microsoft - half-arsed software released half done. Welcome to Apple without Steve Jobs who got angry when things didn't work. They need a new person like him because this is going to destroy Apple with endless stuff not working. I'm off topic. Sorry.

Using caffeine no external disks have been lost.

RANT END

HI All,

I've had this issue for over a year now. It doesn't look like there is anyway to resolve this. However I have a few questions that hopefully someone here can answer.

History:

Mid 2010 27" iMac. I've got different brands of external hard drives (WD and Seagate) being ejected through the USB 2 ports on the back of the computer and through a powered USB hub. I've also got my printer and sometimes my keyboard being ejected as well. And finally my Drobo external hard drive though firewire connection.

I can't tell you how frustrating this is. Every time I need to print something I have to restart my computer.

So my two questions are:

1. Is this a software issue or a hardware issue?

2. My computer is nearing the end of it's life (I'm a photographer and work it pretty hard) so if I do get the new 5K iMac. Will I have the same issue with things ejecting?

Thanks in advance and please do help me!!

You seem to have it worse than most if your keyboard is also ejecting. How do you know? Now that I think of it, I would have to unplug and plug my keyboard in occasionally on my 2009 Mac Pro which also had some external drives ejecting improperly on Sleep. It would happen when I would plug in my iPhone without waking my Mac first. I never connected that to the DNEP issue.

Since your computer is on its way out, you might get lucky and the problem could go away when you buy a new one. That is what has happened to me. I just got a new 6-core Mac Pro which I did not migrate anything over to. I have all my data on external drives but I set this up clean. Apparently, a new Mac doesn't solve the problem for everybody though. I too wish Apple would figure out what is going on and fix it.

Here's my update for whatever it's worth. I bought two LaCie D2 drives and connected them via TB2. I did this because I was not getting any "disk not ejected properly" errors from the LaCie Big that is connected via TB2. For the first several days the drives worked fine. But lately I've noticed a new problem. I'm not sure if this is related to the "disk not ejected properly", but it may be so I'm posting here.

When I put my iMac to sleep, the external drives also sleep—at least at first. But shortly thereafter they start cycling on and off, literally every 60 seconds or so.

This of course wakes up my iMac and prevents it from sleeping. I've called Apple and they are useless.

Is anyone else experiencing something like this?

Yep, same here. It happens with my firewire WD My book studio attached via firewire-to-thunderbolt Apple adapter to my iMac 2012. But I think this happened on Mavericks as well. What happens with Apple recently...

Well, I guess I'm glad I'm not the only one.

Wish I would have paid more attention to this thread. I do recall that someone mentioned this about LaCie drives. Strange thing is I wasn't having the problem with the LaCie Big. The issues have only begun since I connected the LaCie D2s.

Not sure what to do. I know that leaving the iMac on 24/7 is not necessarily bad for it. But I think leaving the external drives on 24/7 is bad? I could shut them off at the end of each work day, but problem is I have an automated back-up routine that runs at 2am while I'm sleeping. I set the iMac to wake up, perform the back-ups, and then sleep.

Guess I'd have to manually perform the back-up each day at the end of the day, which is a pain. If you have any other ideas I'm all ears!

The advice LaCie gives in their user guide for sleep or shut down of the drives is to remove the discs from the desktop, i.e. eject the drives, then push the blue button one second for sleep and four seconds for shut down.

That's what I do.

It's a bit clumsy, but that is what is recommended.

I think I've found the fix for me. Moved the Dropbox folder to another drive. Since then there weren't any ejects when I wake my iMac.

There was an eject today, but it was for another drive - the Time Machine one (WD firewire-to-thunderbolt adapter).

I forgot to mention in my last post that I was on 10.10 when the fix with the moving of the dropbox folder worked. I've now updated to 10.10.2 (and had to reinstall the OS, because I had a grey screen with crossed circle showing up on boot. Nothing worked apart from reinstall. Thanks, Apple) and when I woke my iMac it showed my external drive ejected again with the frustrating message...

---------------

So, my advice to everyone is - return to 10.10 and don't place any folders requiring network access on the external drive.

That doesn't sound right. Is that the case for LaCie thunderbolts used as TimeMachines?

And does it apply when in preferences/energy saver hard disk sleep is not checked, and the only drive sleep would be what the OS does (without consulting the user) while the display is off and the computer unused for a while.

Before Yosemite I had repeated "improperly eject" for TM and other external hard drives. Now with 10.10.2 I get "improperly eject" with the LaCie TM maybe twice a month.

I can't understand why LaCie and Apple as software/hardware manufacturers and as companies can't work better together, particularly since LaCie was an early adopted of Thunderbolt.

I think it reasonable to hope that these two companies can come up with a seamless fix, rather than the clumsy and generally unnecessary fix LaCie seems to offer.

PS can you give me a link to the LaCie advice?

PS - the "improperly ejected" external hard disk problem goes back years and as far as I can tell is not unique to LaCie. There are numerous threads about the general issue, replete with repeated comments that Apple had advised they are working on it.

At a minimum, I would hope that Apple would provide on the main OS X support page a link to a page where Apple lists long-standing issues that Apple is working on and status of the search for a fix. This problem, which seems to involve many thousands of Apple users across several operating system versions, certainly belongs on such an "faq" list.

I've basically given up. I bought a couple of LaCie D2 thunderbolt drives because I wasn't having any "eject" errors with my LaCie Big. Turns out the D2s caused even more problem than my USB3 OWC drives. In addition to the "disk not ejected properly" errors, I was also having sleep wake failures that caused random restarts. After a lot of troubleshooting, including working with Apple engineers, we determined that it was the LaCie D2s that were causing the problem. I've since disconnected them (and returned them) and haven't had a single sleep wake failure since.

So now I'm back to using the USB3 OWC drives, and just mounting/unmounting manually when I need to back up. It means I'm backing up less frequently, and am not able to use Time Machine, but given that a lot of my files are in the cloud now and I use CrashPlan for offsite backup that should be fine. And it's a relief not to be fighting this problem anymore.

That's all very well but I think you are missing the point.

Lacie drives and others are not CAUSING the problem. Apple software is. These drives are a symptom of a pretty basic error in Apple's handling of mounting/unmounting external drives, which we all use in a professional environment. It is a glaring oversight and I would say astonishingly lazy testing on Apple's part.

I would expect this from Microsoft circa 1998.

We are at 10.10.2 and still not fixed.

So far it has not rendered any external drive useless, as far as I know (a keen ear on this subject), so it's just massively totally annoying rather than damaging.

I'm only using Yosemite because I had no choice with a new retina iMac stuffed to the gills. I'd rather be using 10.6.8 any day but I really need the cpu speed for 3d and video and gigantic Logic files.

I wait in some vague hope...

Indeed. Drives from other manufactureres have the same problem, caused by the 10.10.2 update. It is Apple hardware/firmware related.

If you buy an expensive mac pro and the result of this all is that it is better to use the usb3 bus instead of the faster thunderbolt bus Apple should refund part of the price paid for fast thunderbolt.