iMac And External Drive Disconnect Problems

I am currently using a 2010 27" iMac running 10.9.2. I work for a large hospital university and most of the people in my office and in the organization use Windows machines. I connect to external mapped network drives to save material maintained by the university, one drive of my own and one shared by the rest of the faculty and staff.

The Mac often has communication issues with the drives, sometimes two or three times a day. Folders and files within the drives that I was previously able to access appear to vanish. If this was the only problem, I would be ok with simply ejecting the drives and then reconnecting to get back at the contents. When I try to eject, though, Finder often stops responding and the beachball appears. If I force Finder to relaunch, things are fine as long as I don't try to try to reconnect to the drives. If I do, Finder stops responding again. Sometimes, not always, when I try to eject the drives I get a message saying something like "Drive ' ' cannot be ejected because one or multiple applications are using it." I have had this happen even when all applications besides Finder are closed. I thought it might be Finder trying to index what is on the external drives, so I went into the Spotlight settings, but when I tried to add the external drives to the list of things not indexed by Finder, it said they could not be added for unknown reasons. The only thing I can do is restart the computer, often having to do a forced restart by holding down the hardware button as Finder just continues to beachball when I tell it to restart.

As such, I'm left restarting my computer once or twice a day to resolve this. It wouldn't be as bad if I could turn off the irritating "chime" when the computer starts, but I can't. I know I'm supposed to be able by turning on mute before turning off the computer, but even with mute on the "chime" still sounds. It does it both when I'm able to properly restart or when I have to hold down the hardware power button to make the computer turn off. I know the mute is working because after the computer restarts properly, everything else is muted, just not the **** blaring "chime." The sound also comes out of the speakers on the Mac itself, so turning off the speakers that are plugged in does nothing.

This computer is imaged by the university tech support, so things like reinstalling OSX or getting new external drives are simply not options. I recently had the hard drive replaced due to the standard Seagate drives Apple used originally failing. The computer has had two hard drives and both Mountain Lion and Mavericks in the time I have been using it. Same problems with all of that.