Q: Disk not ejected properly

I think it's a hardware/firmware issue. LaCie told me there is a sleep issue and that this is something Apple and LaCie have to tackle the coming time.

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...

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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.

I've basically given up. I bought a couple of LaCie D2 thunderbolt drives because I wasn't having any "eject" errors with my LaCie Big. Turns out the D2s caused even more problem than my USB3 OWC drives. In addition to the "disk not ejected properly" errors, I was also having sleep wake failures that caused random restarts. After a lot of troubleshooting, including working with Apple engineers, we determined that it was the LaCie D2s that were causing the problem. I've since disconnected them (and returned them) and haven't had a single sleep wake failure since.

So now I'm back to using the USB3 OWC drives, and just mounting/unmounting manually when I need to back up. It means I'm backing up less frequently, and am not able to use Time Machine, but given that a lot of my files are in the cloud now and I use CrashPlan for offsite backup that should be fine. And it's a relief not to be fighting this problem anymore.

That's all very well but I think you are missing the point.

Lacie drives and others are not CAUSING the problem. Apple software is. These drives are a symptom of a pretty basic error in Apple's handling of mounting/unmounting external drives, which we all use in a professional environment. It is a glaring oversight and I would say astonishingly lazy testing on Apple's part.

I would expect this from Microsoft circa 1998.

We are at 10.10.2 and still not fixed.

So far it has not rendered any external drive useless, as far as I know (a keen ear on this subject), so it's just massively totally annoying rather than damaging.

I'm only using Yosemite because I had no choice with a new retina iMac stuffed to the gills. I'd rather be using 10.6.8 any day but I really need the cpu speed for 3d and video and gigantic Logic files.

I wait in some vague hope...

Indeed. Drives from other manufactureres have the same problem, caused by the 10.10.2 update. It is Apple hardware/firmware related.

If you buy an expensive mac pro and the result of this all is that it is better to use the usb3 bus instead of the faster thunderbolt bus Apple should refund part of the price paid for fast thunderbolt.

I don't doubt that some (or all?) of the blame lies with Apple. But thing is, my LaCie Big works perfectly fine with my 5k iMac. And I know from talking to LaCie that others are using the D2 thunderbolt 2s without a problem. So it seems to be some combination of hardware and perhaps software that causes the problem.

Now I am facing a slightly different but slightly better situation.  Not having used my iMac for hours, I returned to find a message that my LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt external Raid set (used as Time Machine backup) had not ejected properly, although it showed up on my desktop in its yellow version.  I clicked on the TM icon in the menu bar, and was advised that it was setting up a backup run.  Within seconds the desktop icon of the LaCie Raid Set appeared as such, with the green/white TM logo.

I don't know if this is occasional behavior or the result of some small upgrade in the OS.  Anyone else seeing this behavior?

I do a backup once a day manually. That makes things easier.

So i've got a bit of an update.

After getting so fed up with this ongoing issue (it's been over a year). I took my iMac (mid 2010 27") into apple for them to look at. They said there was no problem with the machine after their tests. However the issue still continued with my Drobo, other external drives, printer etc. continuing to eject.

I finally bit the bullet and purchase a new fully specked out 5K 27" iMac, as my old one was getting slow (i'm a professional photographer) and in the hope that it would resolve the issue.

Guess what?

It didn't.

In fact it was even worse as my Drobo was now plugged in via USB 3 rather than Firewire. So every time the computer went to sleep i'd come back and the hard drives were ejected, the printer, my Wacom tablet and even my wired keyboard. This meant that I had to restart the computer as I couldn't put my password in. ARRGGH.

I tried various combinations in the hope that it was one of the hard drives which was doing it. Just the Drobo on it's own. Still doing it. The Seagate and the WD drive. Still doing it. Just the Seagate drive. Still doing it. So it wasn't down to the external hard drives. I was worried that it had contracted some sort of dodgy software virus.

After almost 5 hours on the phone to apple HQ in California, I've now been told that it is 100% an issue with the Apple OS. Apparently Apple are aware of it and are looking into the issue, but have no timescale on fixing the fault.

So what is happening, is that when the computer goes into sleep mode, it shuts down something to do with the USB ports, which in turn ejects the external hard drives, causing a 'sleep wake kernel panic'. Which can cause the computer to restart. Which was happening to me loads.

They have recommend a work around for me though. Which is to go to System Preferences>Energy Saver and tick the box for "Preventing the computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off". I've also unchecked the box for putting the hard disks to sleep when possible.

We've set up a screen saver to come on if I leave the computer for a while. And the last thing we did was to go to System Preferences>Desktop & Screen Saver and set up a Hot Corner for the bottom right to 'Put Display to Sleep'.

I was told to avoid going to the apple menu and putting the computer to sleep that way and if I want to put the screen to sleep and not the computer to use the hot corner function as there is obviously an issue when the computer goes to sleep.

So if I need to leave the computer over night or for long periods, i'll just shut it down rather than going to sleep. It's a right pain, but no where near as much as having the hard drives, printer, keyboard etc. ejecting and having to restart anyway.

So i'm not quite 24 hours in yet of proper use, but it seems to be working (fingers crossed).

I hope this is of some help to anyone who is having this awful / annoying / soul destroying problem. And lets help that Apple manage to find a solution soon.