Disk not ejected properly

I have one Lacie thunderbolt drive (not SSD) which has suffered and also at least once in the past 2 years became corrupted and needed formatting. I also bought a new cable without any benefit.

This (drive corruption) has happened with other drives as well but is only an occasional event.

Hasn't happened at all (corrupt drives or DNEP message) since my aforementioned power supply change around.

As many people have found - Apple claim to have little or no knowledge of this problem when contacted. I wonder if they can't sort it out so are just burying their heads in the sand.

I suppose the several thousand people affected are only a small proportion of their customer base so not very important.

I am surprised that one of the higher level users haven't found a full solution yet.

I've been having this problem since updating to 10.10.1. Up until 10.10 everything was fine. The problem is with my RAID 2X3 WD My book USB3.

Every day while I'm working on my iMac (late 2012) suddenly dropbox is disconnected, itunes can't find its library, etc. When I try to access the files on the disk, only the folders can be seen and some small files. Disk utility says it can't verify the disks, but once I go into recovery all is fine and they don't need repair.

I've went back to 10.10 and for several weeks all was fine, until recently when I made several reinstalls of the OS, using migration assistant, restoring from backups and so on. Now it happens once again and I've just installed 10.10.1. It was fine for few days and again - few times every day the problem appears. While it is asleep I even got the disk not ejected properly for my time machine firewire disk. This has never happened before. I am so frustrated by these problems at apple. My airplay is also broken and doesn't work at all. I've spent several days in chatting with support, making reinstalls and restoring from backups. I am tired of all of this...

I beg for fixing this issue in 10.10.2 soon!

I am no longer having this problem but my fix probably isn't going to help many others who are having the problem. I just replaced my 2009 Mac Pro which had the DNEP problem happening with at least 2 external drives. This new Mac Pro has a 512GB SSD. I was not able to import or migrate my old settings--tried it but ended up having to erase and reinstall Yosemite on the SSD. I ended up just starting out fresh and reinstalling applications and using iCloud to get some of my data such as Contacts, Keychain and bookmarks for Safari. I am using an OWC Thunderbay enclosure for my 4 hard drives which were inside my 2009 Mac Pro. I have the 2 external drives which were always getting the DNEP message plugged in and no problems. One is a LaCie FireWire 800 drive plugged into the Thunderbolt Display. The other is a Seagate 4TB USB 3.0 drive from Costco.

I don't know if anybody has tried erasing their boot drive and just starting out clean like I am doing. It would be interesting to know if that might fix this problem for others.

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.