Disk not ejected properly

Also, please go into more detail about your dead 3TB Seagate. In what way has it stopped functioning? Is it an internal or external drive? More details would help a lot.

I have three 3TB Seagate externals (Desktop Backup Plus, previous generation). One of them, a FW800/USB 2 model, unmounted itself randomly and persistently and at one point seemed unsalvageable; luckily, I had the spares on hand with which to figure out what was going on, because these particular Seagate externals have swappable bases. When the problem drive was attached to a different base, the unmounting problems disappeared and I was able to get the drive back to normal after running my repair apps. Seagate replaced the bad base, and the new base has been working perfectly.

Hey ministryotech,

Have you tried caffeinate? Since it's a machine that is always on it might work for you. Just open Terminal, type "caffeinate", hit return and leave it running forever.

I'm also curious what a caddy is.

@kahjot - A caddy is an external hard drive box / enclosure that you put hard drives in. External hard drives come fitted in caddies, but you can just buy caddies and put your own hard drives in them.

In regards to the Seagate drive, it's the actual drive itself that's dead. I've tried it in different caddies and on different machines and operating systems and it just won't spin up anymore. It's as if it's not even there. It looks like, at some point, when it's been disconnected the drive has crashed. I can't even get it up enough to run a SMART check off one of my Linux servers.

Hi ministryotech,

Caffeinate is easy to try and it could help. The biggest change in Mavericks was they added very aggressive energy management which tries to turn off processes and hardware all the time, even when you are actively using the computer. If you tried caffeinate and it helps it would be a good data point for us all trying to figure out what's going on.

ministryotech wrote:

@kahjot - A caddy is an external hard drive box / enclosure that you put hard drives in. External hard drives come fitted in caddies, but you can just buy caddies and put your own hard drives in them.

In regards to the Seagate drive, it's the actual drive itself that's dead. I've tried it in different caddies and on different machines and operating systems and it just won't spin up anymore. It's as if it's not even there. It looks like, at some point, when it's been disconnected the drive has crashed. I can't even get it up enough to run a SMART check off one of my Linux servers.

Thanks for clarifying the terminology. "Caddy" sounds like what is usually called an external drive enclosure here; but I also have one old ATA enclosure that uses swappable trays, so I was picturing something like those trays when you mentioned "caddies".

I usually buy good HD enclosures and install my drive of choice in them, but I also have a few brand-name externals that we acquired for little or nothing (two Seagates and one WD). If yours doesn't spin up, it is most likely dead. But its failure might be unrelated to the ejection issues. Is the Seagate still under warranty?

Shortly after updating to 10.9.2 I started getting the unexpected ejects on a 3TB Seagate drive connected to my Thunderbolt display on my late 2012 retina MacBook Pro. The problem continued even when I connected the drive directly to the rMBP on a second Thunderbolt port. Robster50's fix has worked so far, and it also fixed a very annoying problem I was having with my Magic TrackPad moving the mouse erratically, stuttering and often not registering clicks on the first tap. The SystemConfiguration folder seems to hold a lot of plists and apparently one or more of them got corrupted somewhere along the line. Thanks Robin!

I have tried, Jettison, Robin50's suggestion and the "Spotlight" method and nothing works for very long. My SeaGate OneTouch4 keeps getting "ejected". It all started with OSX 10.9.2. I sure hope Apple fixes this problem.

No. I am new to apple so i am not sure how to run it. I think I just opern Terminal and type "caffeinate", but are there any other qualifiers? I just downloaded the "upgrade" to Jettison to see if that works.

Hi Mmanna1,

Yes, just open Terminal, type "caffeinate" (without the quotes), hit return, and leave it running forever. You can make the Terminal window small or minimize it. You'll have to remember to do this when you restart your Mac.

You can stop it by either closing the Terminal window, or typing a control-C into the Terminal window.

Thank you. I have done it. Will see how long it lasts. Seems like a real problem that Apple needs to solve. The only reason I have an external hard drive is for the Time Machine. There must be another way around the problem. I guess Apple wants us to use iCloud to store the backups. Not sure I want to do that.

The Caffeinate method did not work either. As a test I mounted a USB Flash drive to the iMac in addition to the SeaGate Maxtor OneTouch 4 external hard drive. Lo and behold the hard drive is still being ejected but the flash drive is not. Perhaps that is a clue that could add to the solution. Why would not both be ejected?

Just a quick update:

I have not heard back from Apple since the problem was escalated to Engineering and the system file was sent to them for examination.

Also, this afternoon I plugged a simple thumb drive into my USB port to copy some files over. I'll give you three guesses what happened and the first two and a half don't count: only one file was copied before the 'disk not ejected properly' error appeared.

It's a thumb drive, a flash drive, just a little stick I can carry files around on. 'Frustrated' is not the word I would use right now. "Righteously ******" is closer.

Robster50's solution worked for me with a Seagate Free Agent 3Tb drive used with Time Machine on a MBP 5,1. A Monoprice 8 port hub connects the pair. When ejecting the external drive from the Finder, the process is also quicker - no 2-3 second wait for ejection. Thanks!

More info:

After giving up on my Mac Mini Server I tried plugging the external drives into my Time Capsule - Same problem. Although odd I couldn't rule out at this point that the same bug had made it into the latest Time capsule firmware update.

As a last ditch attempt I tried running the external drives off of one of my Synology NAS servers (They have a Time Machine feature built in too). Interestingly I saw exactly the same problem - the drives would be disconnected, but only once I started using them for Time Machine. If I just use them as expanded NAS stores they are absolutely fine!

I am now trying backing up to the internal drives on my NAS, which means I'll have to split all my backups and is far from ideal but right now I'm down to having no backups at all.

This leads me to believe the following, both from my experiences and what I've read so far...

1. Time Machine appears to be the root of the problem, NOT OSX itself

2. Seagate drives (not enclosures necessarilly but actual hard drives) seem to be the most affected. I wonder if this is related to the drive power management styles on certain models (I have another external drive that is also seagate but is fine). I'd be interested to know if drives like the WD Greens are similarly affected.

3. The issue affects network volume mountings as well as external hard drives

I have a theory that if I replaced my hard disks with something like the WD Red drives then I may be better off, but I don't really want to throw any more money at this right now. I'll keep reporting back on the Synology option though, as if this works I'd be tempted to get a dedicated NAS for Time Machine, RAID Mirror it, stick it in a corner and let it just get on with it.

It's not the Time Machine that's the problem, I haven't had mine connected for a couple of years because I work from home and it destroyed the connection with my office VPN (not because of the Time Capsule/Time Machine themselves, but because my employer opted for a low quality of network components).