OS X Mavericks doesn't read my external hard drive

I don't think it's the OS I think it's the drive manufacturers. It used to be that you could buy a drive and plug it in and it would work. Now, some of them are embedding stuff right into the interface of external drives that requires firmware updates, like the OP has found out.

Western Digital is doing this and other stuff with some of their backup drives. I know that on one of them, the power switch and lights don't work properly unless you install their drivers. Their drivers were also apparently deleting backups, and they're supposed to be backup drives!

In another one of their units, a guy with a PC got one of them and he didn't want to use their backup software after he realized he couldn't really have full control of the drive. He thought he'd just canabalize the drive out of the enclosure and use it as a straight SATA drive. He found out that the interface board between the USB and the drive also had embedded encryption, making the drive useless.

Moral of the story: Be careful what you buy, and stay away from units that require manufacturers software. When the OS changes, if they're not keeping up, you'll pay the price, and it will probably be too late to return it.

I'm convinced that if you want to build an external hard drive and use it as a regular hard drive, you should just buy a raw HD and a decent case and forget the manufacturers that are coming up with all these weird configurations. That's the way all the older types of externals pretty much were. I've got some ancient USB and FireWire externals and Mavericks has no problems with them at all.

I actually bought one of those WD's you're talking about. I plugged it in, it seemed to work OK, but like you said, the power button wouldn't work. I hadn't read the manual because I just figured "it's just an external drive." On reading the manual it's like you said, half the stuff doesn't work unless you install their firmware and their drivers. I thought it was a stupid design so I returned it.

I then bought a Seagate, which was clicking like crazy. I returned that too, thinking it was failing. I later found out this was caused by some new low-power feature that causes the drive heads to park about every 5 seconds.

Believe it or not, I ended up finding an IDE drive and sticking it in and old Firewire case. Works great. It doesn't have any power management - just the on/off switch, which miraculously works!😁

Apple switched to a 64 bit EFI in Mountain Lion and some manufacturers have been having problems since.

An Apple technician told me to try to use an USB Hub 2.0, as this might work (still have to try).

I don't really call this maintainance... :/

What he's really telling you to do is use the hub to act as an "interface isolation box" under the assumption that the hub will be compatible with the drive and the Mac will be compatible with the hub.

...unless of course there's a hub incompatibility issue. 😁

Sorry to get back so late to you. The problems we were having were with the Western Digital driver set. It's pretty well documented on this site and other sites as well. In it's worst case it not only doesn't seem to react well with the drive, it's been completely erasing the contents of some of them. For any one interested or needing advice about this, the "official" Western Digital link is here:

http://wdc.com/wdproducts/wdsmartwareupdate/wdsmartware.asp?id=wdfGeneric&os=mac

And here are a few more:

http://www.maclife.com/article/news/western_digital_releases_os_x_mavericks_fix_ external_hard_drives

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5616045

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/26/western-digital-releases-new-hard-drive-soft ware-after-mavericks-data-loss/

Some of their drives are strange. As was pointed out in another post, if you don't install the drivers, the power switch and use-level indicators don't work. I could go on and on. I'm really under the impression that if a drive doesn't work without properly without drivers, don't buy it. One of our people contacted WD in the U.S. and they said that had no working Mac test units in their labs for that unit. Seems kind of reckless to me, but then again I'm not the guy with egg all over my face either!

@original poster:

Out of curiousity, any resolution or feedback from the company yet?

This, of course, begs the next question: What if the hub isn't compatible????

Well, at least this might be something of a work around for people having this problem. But it's a workaround, not a fix.

Hey Guys,

I had the same problem with Core CNMemory USB3 2TB.

It could not be mounted, deleted or anything else after using it for months as timemashine drive.

It was shown in DiskUtil but partition was greyed out.

I tried repairing option but it did not work because it could not be unmounted.

Now I tried a USB 2.0 Cable.

It worked.

Frustrating that USB 3.0 cannot be used in a reliable manner.

All data is now shown and I am just deleting it to use it for other things.

Hope that helps.

In this case I’d look into getting a different enclosure. I’ve seen the USB 3.0 split-micro connectors fail at an alarming rate. Enclosures, from which the original drives had been removed, can be found for less than a dollar and include all cables and power supplies.

So...when the guys at the Genius bar are telling people to put a USB 2 hub in between the external hard drive and the computer what they're really doing, and might not know about it, is simply replacing the cable types.

Whoda thought?????

FYI I think I've seen some of those "Enclosures, from which the original drives had been removed, can be found for less than a dollar and include all cables and power supplies" on OWC. Might be over a dollar though...like $1.50. 😉

Actually I’ve seen the sockets peel up right off the circuit board. I’m guessing that the half specific to USB 3.0 may have a bad connection or three.

I just checked, OWC has one for $0.99, but then there’s the shipping… :-P