Disk not ejected properly

houstonwehaveaproblem2014 wrote:

That's helpful info, although I think external HDDs other than seagate are affected. (I'm assuming you're running different OSs on the same machine and getting ejected (or not) according to which OS your USB3 HDD is plugged into?)

And for what it's worth, Apple are aware of this thread (so mind your language everyone!) and last week I heard the "u" word mentioned during a call-back regarding my long-running case. Fingers crossed.

I would assume that other drives are affected. The Seagates just happen to be the only USB 3 drives I have at the moment. You are correct that there are several operating systems installed on my Mac Pro (Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks) and that these particular drives are improperly ejected in Mountain Lion (and Mavericks) but not in Snow Leopard. I just booted into Mountain Lion to verify that the USB 3 drive gets ejected improperly but not the FW drive, and this does seem to be the case. I have an OWC enclosure (FW800, USB3, eSATA) on the way, and I will be interested in seeing whether it does any better with USB 3 than the Seagates. Before then, I want to do a bit of testing to see if there is an ejection issue with drives attached to the eSATA ports on the CalDigit card.

Following up: I just ran a quick test, hooking up a drive in a quad-interface OWC enclosure to eSATA on the CalDigit combo USB3/eSATA card. This drive is not improperly ejected when the computer sleeps. It's possible that there is an issue with the CalDigit driver for Mountain Lion, but no issue with their Snow Leopard driver; but I am inclined to suspect that it's an OS problem, since most people reporting the improper ejection error don't have my system configuration.

I'm having the same problem with a pair of drives in a USB connected dual caddy (USB3 compatible).

I'm on my second caddy after initially think the caddy was broken. Both are slightly different. I have tried USB 3 and USB 2 cables and experience the same problem on both. It's not power related as I can be looking at the screen and it'll just decide to drop off. I've set all my power settings to never sleep regardless. These are all connected to a Mac Mini which I ue as my file server.

This all started for me after the 9.0.2 upgrade for Mavericks.

I also have an attached Thunderbolt drive and a second USB 3 drive that I use for offsite backups, neither of which seem to have a problem.

I am utterly fuming about this now. I've spent £60 on a new caddy and I've already lost 1 3TB seagate HDD which is now totally dead due to this problem.

I'm trying running the caddy off my time capsule as a last resort. Failing that I think I'll just buy a Synology NAS instead and dedicate it to my time machine backups. They seem to be a fair bit more reliable than my newer Apple kit.

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.