I have a new Western Digital My Book for Mac 3 TB external drive that does not wake up properly after it has been unactive just a few minutes. Had this problem both before and after updating to Maverick. I get a : error code -50. I can't find any reference to this on the net anywhere.
Did you ever find a solution to this problem? I'm having the same issue.
I keep getting the error -50 and can not write to the external drive. It's crazy frustrating. Does anyone have a solution?
The only solution I've seen is to eject the drive (usually requiring it to be force-ejected, and sometimes even that doesn't work), and then remount the drive. Then it works again. If it doesn't let you force-eject the drive, then you can restart your computer instead.
Apple has known about this problem for at least a few years and have chosen not to address it.
FWIW: if you installed any WD software, remove it and reformat your HD to use HFS+.
There are several posts providing instructions on how to do this.
I have several WD disks running just fine this way.
The same thing applies to Seagate disks.
There is no advantage to the use of substandard software that was developed as an afterthought so the drive could be marketed to OS X users with a promise of a "cosmic app" that would "solve" your back up problems. Time Machine doesn't use this software and CCC doesn't use it.
western digital error code -50
