Anyone else having problems with external disks unmounting randomly/suddenly on Mavericks?

I have been having an issue with Mavericks unmounting my external USB disk suddenly, followed by a Finder notification that the disk was ejected improperly. This has only started since upgrading to 10.9. I have tried unchecking "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" in System Prefs, but it has not helped. Weirdly, the drive icon does not disappear from the desktop when this happens, so I don't know if it's actually ejecting, or if the system just thinks it is. At any rate, it does appear to be a bug.

MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9), 8GB RAM

Posted on Oct 30, 2013 10:51 PM

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218 replies

Dec 23, 2013 11:43 AM in response to realtwang

The disconnect issue (only with FireWire here, USB/eSATA fine) is still going on after update to 9.1. I got one thing new for one of the drive that disconnects: it does not dsconnect anymore, but it becomes unaccessible and put my system in a infinite loop (needs to power off/on the unit to get system back). When it happens, the console shows many many entries like this:


kernel: disk12s2: device is not ready


the "put to sleep" option on or off does not make any difference beside being less frequent when it's off.


There is another issue with Maverick extensively documented in this thread:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5492808(10-30s delay before the finder displays the directory of a window)


Two solutions around this bug are provided. Solution 1 is to have the scroll bars on "always" (Prefrences/General). Solution 2 is to modify the auto_master file. I did both and it fixed the slow display problem and....not a single random eject of my FireWire drives since then!

The solution 2 has to do with NFS networking, could it be that is causing the random eject as well?

If some people can try and report their experience with FireWire drives....

Dec 28, 2013 1:09 PM in response to Laurent Seroude

i am opn mavericks right now and i was talking about this on an other thread and i concluded that my power line might have a voltage fluctuation problem as my usb hub would eject drives only when i would toggle the fan or the lights in my room on/off. but now after noticing this thread i am beginning to wonder. i had a similar problem with my older belkin 4 port powered usb hub and i threw it away thinking it was not working. how dumb of me. that was with mountain lion.


infact when i connect my iphone on the new usb hub now on mavericks it continuously connects and disconnects the device! i unplug the usb cable from the computer and let it charge via the hub, works fine!!! weird!


i am on a brand new mb air 2013 and this problem was there even on my old macbook pro 2010 a little over a month ago.


i guess i'll wait before buying a new hub. until then will use the drives directly pluggin them in.

Dec 31, 2013 8:28 AM in response to gjucker

I've had the same problems in the past week after buying a 3 TB Lacie external drive. I've had to reformat the drive three times for multiple problems. First, I received an error saying that the drive couldn't be mounted. Second, my password wouldn't work to open the drive. Third, I received some encryption error after it copied my HD. Furthermore, when I went to Time Machine settings, there was not an option to Encrypt the files.


Like I said, after a third attempt at erasing the disk with Mac OS Journaled, Encrypted - trimming down my password to something simple...it seems to be working. I've never had a thunderbolt connected HD before, I don't know if that could be a contributor or not but Time Machine seems to be working now. It caused me a lot of stress and I hope it holds up.


Happy New Year!


Darin

Jan 15, 2014 8:42 PM in response to realtwang

I am having a similar issue with my new 27" iMac with Mavericks. I took a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green out of my Mac Pro, and put it in an external drive enclosure. I am trying to use it as my Time Machine drive--but it ejects randomly and the backup stops. I have tried various things suggested in posts: remove Google Drive, change the Energy Saver settings, etc, but no luck. This is the second external device I am trying with the same results.

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Anyone else having problems with external disks unmounting randomly/suddenly on Mavericks?

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