Disk not ejected properly

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.

It's great that switching between USB3 and USB2 works for some folks, but for the record I tried this early on and it didn't help. I was using USB2 hubs when the problem started, I got new USB3 hubs, but the "did not eject properly" problem continued. I also tried using Jettison, which helped somewhat but not enough. For me only caffeinate has worked well. I rarely see the DNEP message (maybe 2 or 3 times in 6 months) and my nightly backups are running smoothly.

I should probably go try to bother Apple support about the problem, but (A) that would take a lot of my time and (B) it's an intermittent problem so it would be VERY difficult to convince them it's an actual a problem. If there is some way to vote for Apple to work on this problem without wasting an afternoon at the Apple store, let me know.

An update to my earlier post. After leaving to go work on something outside the office, I came back to discover that my screen saver had kicked on, and, no surprise, the disk had "not ejected properly." I modified the settings to leave all the boxes unchecked in Energy Saver, moved the Computer Sleep and Display Sleep sliders all the way to "never," and then remounted the drive. All this while caffeinate was supposedly running, so that didn't solve the problem entirely. I then put itunes on and muted it but left it playing while I was out for a couple hours. When I came back, the computer still wide awake, the backup to timemachine had finally finished. So I suspect that I could probably uncaffeinate and still keep the disk mounted, as long as the hard drive and display never go to sleep. I'm going to test that hypothesis over the next few hours and see what happens. Obviously, not being able to let your computer go to sleep is NOT a solution to this glitch in the system, but it seems to be the best I'm going to get from Apple (my organization's tech support person has been "on his way over" since last Thursday). Good luck, everyone!

Is this problem happening on any Mac including the new Mac Pro? I don't know what I will buy when my 2009 Mac Pro is ready to be replaced. The new Mac Pros have no internal space for hard drives and I can't see putting up with this problem with several external drives that I would need. Right now, I only have this problem of discs ejecting with 2 external drives--one a USB 3.0 and the other an eSATA drive. I have 4 internal drives that are no problem and one FireWire 800 drive that I use for Time Machine which is doing just fine.

It started for me with a new Macbook Pro purchased December 2013. I had no problems with a previous MacBook Pro which has OS X 10.6.8 "Snow Leopard" on it. Indeed, there is not enough disk space on the new MacBook Pro for even a modest collection of photos and music and such, so an external drive is a necessity. Plus Time Machine and other backup drives.

genius_foo wrote:

It started for me with a new Macbook Pro purchased December 2013. I had no problems with a previous MacBook Pro which has OS X 10.6.8 "Snow Leopard" on it. Indeed, there is not enough disk space on the new MacBook Pro for even a modest collection of photos and music and such, so an external drive is a necessity. Plus Time Machine and other backup drives.

I may have made a comment about this earlier, if so, please forgive the redundancy.

Apple has decided to produce systems stripped of what they probably see as potentially problematic internal expansion options. Some of them (such as Retina MBPs, iMacs) are for the most part sealed and generally cannot easily be upgraded by the user. Main storage and backup storage have to be external. Capabilities that we add to older systems via PCie cards are now also off-loaded onto external expansion boxes.

Under these circumstances, the ports that support all these devices really, really need to work properly. And yet this disk ejection issue has persisted through at least two major releases of the Mac OS, and possibly three: I haven't had time to run a test with Lion yet.

If I didn't have a Mac Pro capable of running Snow Leopard, this would be driving me nuts. I feel fortunate that for me, it is just an annoyance.

What with this and the nightmare over Pages is Apple Mac going off the boil? I have an old MacBook running mavericks and I expect to look for a replacement in the next year or so ... will I be looking at a PC? Jury is out at the moment.

After spending way too much time on this issue, I decided to purchase a new external hard drive with a USB 3.0 connection. At a local store that only sells Apple equipment, I purchased a Western Digital 1TB "My Passport" drive. It utilizes a USB 3.0 connection. I did not install any of the included WD software. I installed it yesterday and selected it through Time Machine as the backup. Since then there has been no self ejection and the unit has done backups as directed by Time Machine. I consider the problem solved for me. It is well worth the money.

That's interesting, mmann1, my Seagate that kept ejecting has a USB 3.0 connection. I got it it to replace my Western Digital "my Passport", because the Western Digital wouldn't mount after I got my new iMac running Mavericks (it worked fine on my old iMac running Snow Leopard). Since I have had the Seagate plugged into a powered USB hub, I haven't had the problem of it ejecting improperly anymore.

It has been 6 full days since I installed the WD Passport drive that uses a USB 3.0 cable on my iMac with 10.9.3 Mavericks. I have experienced no "disk not ejected properly" error messages. As an experiment, I took my old Maxtor OneTouch4 external hard drive with it's USB 2.0 connection that would not work on the 10.9.2 Mavericks and installed in on our church iMac that is using 10.7 "Lion" software. It mounted fine and has experienced no ejections. There must either be a USB connection issue or a software issue.

I am on mavericks and this has just started to happen for me on iMac mid 2011.

Before(no issue) I had :

Standard 1tb internal drive and a nas media centre type 500gb connected via the Ethernet..

Now eject errors on my external 1tb seagate connected through usb2

I have also got the original 1tb in an enclosure connected via usb2 and this does not have an issue. It does have an external power supply.

The internal,drive is now a crucial 256 SSD.

on wake from sleep I see the error message for both partitions of the 1tb seagate external drive..

My gut feeling is that there is some power management issues. I'm going to scan through the Eco settings and see if there is anything going on on the seagate forums.

I doubt that it is power issues, because it is happening with my iPod and with a 1GB thumb drive. I don't have any heavy external drives. I have been wanting to connect my Time Capsule to run a backup but am very much afraid to now, with this problem.

Another update to my series of posts earlier. Now that all the boxes are unchecked in the energy saver, and now that I have the hard drive and display set to never sleep, I do not get the disk ejected message anymore. I have updated to 10.9.3, which may or may not matter - I'm going to check some boxes in the energy saver later today and let the hard disk try to sleep to see what happens while I'm out of the office. In the meantime, I have told the computer to go to sleep manually several times, and after short naps the computer wakes with the disk still connected. So the current setup works, but saves no energy. I'll update again when my energy saver settings are adjusted back to slightly-more-eco-friendly. Thanks again, Apple, I *really love* your new free OS with all its glitches (external display with their own software can be its own horrible problem...) - worth only slightly less than I paid for it.