Disk not ejected properly

For the last two days, I turned off the Time Machine software on my iMac OSX 10.9.2 and my Maxtor OneTouch4 external hard drive stayed connected. This morning I tried to run Time Machine manually and about 1/2 through the process of "preparing" the back up I got the message that the drive did not eject properly. In Energy Saver, I have the Prevent computer from sleeping box checked and the Put Hard Drives To Sleep box unchecked. In Spotlight, I have the drive excluded from any searches. All this started when I upgraded to 10.9.2 on 2/26/14. Before then Time Machine worked as designed.

I really think this is a 10.9.2 (some have if from Mavericks earlier builds) issue with the Time Machine software itself. My experiences were similar. It would be interesting to know the spec details of the physical hard disk inside your Maxtor OneTouch.

On a more positive note - It has now been two days since I moved Time Machine duties over to the internal drives on my Synology NAS systems and my Time Capsule - Since then I've had no issues at all. It seems that Time Machine does something wonky that causes external drives to be disconnected, whether TM is running on the connected machine or whether the external drive is plugged in to a network server. If you back up to an internal drive on a network server it seems OK.

It would be interesting to know if this specifically affects USB attached devices or whether Thunderbolt is also affected (although who wants to pay the bucks to run a TBolt drive as Time Machine? A NAS is cheaper!) I may investigate whether my NAS has an eSATA port and see if that's affected as my enclosure has an eSata connection on it.

Unfortunately I don't know much about the Maxtor OneTouch4 hard drive. It is 5 years old and I purchased it from our church to use as a backup on my old PC. When I purchased my iMac, I used the Disk Utility to format and partition the drive to the Mac Operating system. I should mention that the drive is USB connected and the drive end is a "mini". If I can't get this to work, I will look at purchasing a Time Capsule (maybe that's what is driving this anyway).

I tried attaching a drive in an OWC enclosure to my Mac Pro, to see if that enclosure would do any better than my Seagate brand externals that get ejected improperly when the computer sleeps/wakes, and as I expected, the result is the same. Mountain Lion and Mavericks both exhibit this problem, Snow Leopard does not.

Today I installed 10.9.3 update that was just released for OSX today, 5/15/14, with high hopes that the problem had been solved. It was not. Time Machine did one backup but the second an hour later caused the external hard drive to eject.

I talked with the techies at the Mac Computer store where I bought the iMac and they suggested that I completely reinstall the complete operating system.

I just got off the phone with Apple again. The problem was supposedly escalated to Engineering three weeks ago, I have not heard anything since, there is no sign that this escalation actually happened. Now they want to say it's a hardware problem and I should take the laptop in for a diagnostic. I will not be taking it into an Apple provider, I have had it with them.

BTW, some have mentioned that it doesn't seem that anyone at Apple knows about the problem, even though it has so much attention on the forums. I can confirm that Apple tech support pays no attention to these forums. I told the specialist that my problem is not unique to me or my devices, it is happening to many people with many different species of external drive, that it is largely with Mavericks although some have reported it with Mountain Lion. The specialist flat out said that if people aren't calling Applecare with a problem, they don't know about it, that the forums are only for users to have discussions with each other. So the only way a fix will be found is if people start bugging Applecare with it.

I was on the phone with an Apple Tech and his supervisor. After a ejecting and re-mounting the drive, it stayed connected for at least 2 TIme Machiine backups but then it self ejected. They think it is the USB 2.0 cable that I have on the External Hard Drive. I will need to find a USB 3.0 with a "mini" connection to the hard drive and a standard one to the iMac. I will give it a try. At the same time they had me mount a USB Flash Drive and it stays connected, but of course it was not being used by the Time Machine.

I decided to try unplugging my Seagate from the USB3 drive on the back of my new iMac running Mavericks and plugging into my USB2 hub instead. So far it isn't ejecting my Seagate anymore. It has gone to sleep three times and awoken three times without ejecting. I will repost when enough time elapses to see wether or not this is a real fix.

This is an addendum to my post above. I hope it helps someone out there, because it does look like it solved my problem.

I just talked to an actually very helpful senior advisor at AppleCare, Allen. He said that the reason my Seagate backup drive is not being ejected improperly every time my Mac goes to sleep, now that I have the Seagate plugged into my USB hub instead of directly into the USB port on back of my iMac, is that my USB hub has its own power source. The USB powered backup drives that don’t have their own power source (like mine) have drivers that tell the device to go to sleep when the computer goes to sleep, so they won’t be drawing their power from the computer while the computer is sleeping. When the computer wakes up, the backup drive doesn’t wake up quickly enough; therefore, it ejects. So, connecting a backup drive to a powered USB hub is a perfect workaround. I can’t believe I actually thought of trying it. It worked, but I didn’t know why until I talked to Allen at AppleCare. He said the only other workaround, until Seagate & some other manufacturers come out with a new driver to solve the problem, is to manually eject the backup device before putting the computer to sleep and unplug it; then, plug it back in before waking the computer back up …which would be a royal pain!

Unfortunately this won't help me. This is happening with my iPod and my flash drives the moment I plug them in. It has nothing to do with the computer going to sleep because they aren't connected to the laptop when it goes to sleep.

I bought an external power supply for my OWC drive and it didn't solve the problem. The problem lies in

the usb 3 programming I think. I think using a usb 2 hub might work ok though. I may try this later and see.

John

Definitely not limited to USB: Mountain Lion and Mavericks improperly eject my eSATA externals, too. It's like Apple added a mean, incompetent bouncer to the OS after Snow Leopard.

BTW I don't have any bus-powered drives in use with the Mac Pro, and it happens regardless.

As I posted previously, I've this same problem on SSD drive cards in a Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis (Sonnet) on both a Macbook Air running 10.8.5 and a new 2013 Mac Pro running 10.9. This was with two different (but same type) expansion chassis and drives. And I had the same issue on a USB3 SSD, too, I brought in to temporarily use to avoid down time. I've tried all the remedies mentioned on this and another similar thread to no avail. I'm not using these drives for Time Machine either. So, I'm pretty sure this is not an interface-specific, cable problem, or drive type issue. My only clue is the USB3 SSD had no issue while it was plugged into a Mac Mini server running 10.8.5 OSX _Server_, but when I plugged into the Mac Pro with 10.9, pretty immediately had the same issue we're all having here. One thing about OSX Server is I think it never spins disks down so there could be some issue here with respect to disk/power management.

Als, I actually had the OWC SSD PCIe card installed in an older 2008 Mac Pro (also running 10.9) and had no issues. When I migrated over to the new Mac Pro (no internal PCIe slots) and installed the card in the Sonnet Thunderbird chassis, I started getting the "did not eject properly" issue followed by issues (probably due to some type of corruption) writing to the drive. I wish I had time to do much more considered A vs. B. vs. C testing to try to isolate this issue more, but have to keep up with my real-life job, too. I've always enjoyed not having to deal with too many of these types of issues in my almost 29 years of using Macs. This is definitely one of the most frustrating.

Being new to Apple products after using PC's since the mid 1980's, I am surprised that this problem still exists after all the postings on the forum. I spent an hour on the phone with an Apple Care expert and he thought is was due to a bad cable (I am using a USB 2.0 A to 5 pin mini) from my iMac to the external hard dirve. I have not been able to find a similiar 3.0 USB cable and have been reluctant to purchase a new USB 2.0 cable. I had no problem until I upgraded to 10.9.2 and the new 10.9.3 did not fixt the problem either.

I'm running 10.9.2 on a 27-inch imac mid-2011, and ever since the Mavericks upgrade I've been unable to complete a time machine backup on my usb3 WD elements 3TB external drive (my usb2 drive was working fine, but I migrated it home and now it's sitting there laughing at me). The disk did not eject properly message would pop up on me every hour or so, and I'd have to manually eject what was left of the disk, unplug it, and start all over. I never got through more than about 2% of a backup (my drive only has c. 300GB used!) before an eject message. Today I found the caffeinate Terminal command suggestion and, even though I have all power save options completely disabled on my machine, I tried it out. Nearly 2 hours later, without any ejections, my timemachine backup is at about 30% complete. I'll update this post when (if, fiingers crossed!) the whole thing completes. But I'm optimistic so far, as this is the only thing that has had any effect over the past two weeks of haphazard fix efforts. My disk not properly ejected message did not have anything to do with the machine going to sleep, though, I'd be in the middle of working on a powerpoint or a word document or writing an email and that stupid notification center message would pop up telling me that my drive had ejected, so there must be some fiddly bugs deep in Mavericks' power management settings that are causing this issue. At least in my case.