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Mavericks and unmounting external drive issues upon sleep

Greetings fellow Mavericks users,


I'm hoping someone here can provide some insight as to how to correct the issue I'm experiencing.


Little background:

I was using 10.6.8 for years on a 2008 Mac Pro. I saw no reason to update the OS until I recently acquired a USB 3.0 PCI card and an external drive. In order to use my new hardware, I had no choice but to upgrade to a new version of OSX. Rather than spend money, I took advantage of the free 10.9.2 upgrade available for my machine. The upgrade went surprisingly well with no major hiccups or problems encountered. Yes, a few apps and programs I had running prior to the upgrade were no longer compatible but in the grand scheme of things, my Mac Pro was still alive and kicking along with my most important programs and data. In fact, the upgrade to 10.9.2 fixed a sleep issue I had with 10.6.8 which required the use of an app called PleaseSleep. I don't need that app anymore as the machine goes to sleep and wakes up fine.


Now, on to my dilemma. Prior to the upgrade, I was using an external USB 2.0 drive to house media that I'd share between multiple network devices around the house via SMB (AFP stinks in this regard, hence my refusal to use it); i.e. BoxeeBox. I had run out of space on the USB2 drive hence the need to move everything to my new external USB3 drive that's connected to an internal USB3 PCI controller. The first problem I ran into was that Mavericks now uses Apple's own iteration of Samba (SMB2). After a bit of head scratching and research, I used an application called SMBUp as a replacement to Apple's SMB implementation. That's one problem solved. The next thing that I kept running into was that whenever the machine would sleep then wake up again, I'd get an annoying "Disk was not properly ejected" error message. After more head scratching and research, I've discovered that this appears to be a bug in OSX and how the OS interfaces with 3rd party USB controllers. Fine. I purchased a small app called Jettison which for all intents and purposes unmounts any external drives automatically before allowing the system to sleep. This is where my long-winded (apologies) description above starts to come into play. Now that I have the SMB issue figured out and am using Jettison to eject this USB3 drive when the machine sleeps, I've discovered that I'll still get the "Disk did not properly eject" error message despite Jettison IF there are users connected to the USB3 media drive. Is there a work around this where I can either get Jettison or Mavericks to kill the network connection to the share drive before it's unmounted prior to the machine sleeping?


TL:DR?

Using Jettison with Mavericks, I'm still getting "Disk did not eject properly" when waking the machine from sleep mode. Any way to fix this?


Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions provided.

2008 Mac Pro 2.8 GHz 8 core, Mac OS X (10.6.1), Also have a G4 MDD 1.25DP

Posted on May 5, 2014 8:51 AM

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5 replies

May 5, 2014 6:39 PM in response to amstel78

By the way, if the system was *physically* unable to unmount the drive, what would the error message in the logs look like, or what words would it use? I've searched the console logs using terms like failed or fail plus unmount, eject, ejected, etc with nothing obvious coming up that would indicate there truly was a hardware issue with the unmount/ejection process.


I'm wondering if the drive really is being unmounted correctly and the error messages I'm getting upon system wake is simply a bug. The reason for this thought is that during the few moments while the system begins the process of sleeping, I observe the USB3 drive spinning down and going into a no-power state. I also run disk utility to verify the drive upon the next wake (if the DNEP error is shown), and it always comes back as fine.

May 5, 2014 7:10 PM in response to amstel78

There is currently no fix for this (drive not ejected properly) except to stop sleeping your Mac Pro (which is what I did). It also happens on native Mac ports with some but not all external drives. From what I've seen, bus powered drives are affected less than self powered drives.


While I do believe it will be fixed overtime for native Mac ports, tt may never be fixed for the older Mac Pro's since a PCIE card gets powered down on sleep. All PCIE USB3 cards do this that I have tested (Inatech, RocketU, Oricon).


I can say that other than the annoyance, I've seen no problems from the error but I don't use Time machine on any of my externals, only clones.

May 6, 2014 2:47 AM in response to ssls6

Thanks for your input ssls6. My external drive has its own power source. I'm curious though; if the PCIe card is getting powered down, and from what I can tell, the drive itself is spinning down during a sleep cycle, is the drive being unmounted properly despite the error message? I'm more concerned about data integrity and can live with the message as long as the data itself is safe.


FWIW, the data on the drive in question is media; audio and video. My TM drive is an internal unit connected directly to onboard SATA. I've also discovered via the logs that smbd can affect unmounting of the drive even if the Mac Pro is awake - try running Disk Utility's verify command if an SMB share is active. This I assume is why I still get the disk not ejected properly error if the computer goes to sleep. Now it makes even more sense if what you say about the PCIe card getting powered down is accurate.

Jun 24, 2014 12:49 PM in response to amstel78

I had the same problem with Time Machine and solved it by enabling "Enable Power Nap" in Energy Saver:


System Preferences...

Energy Saver

Restore Defaults

Check "Enable Power Nap: While sleeping, your Mac can back up using Time Machine and periodically check for new email, calendar, and other iCloud updates."


2013 21.5 iMac

OSX Mavericks

Seagate 1 TB slim USB 3.0 (power is drawn from USB port), formatted to Mac Journaling File System

Mavericks and unmounting external drive issues upon sleep

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