Yosemite ejects external drives

Thank you, uninstalling the Western Digital Utilities solved the random powering off of my external USB 2TB My Passport Ultra WD external hard drive.

P.S. This worked on a late 2008 13" Macbook with El Capitan installed.

This issue is nonstop.

We we've tried everything from updating to macOS Server 5.3.1 on a new Mac mini (purchased August 2017) preloaded with macOS Sierra, to changing to a new Thunderbolt cords. The LaCie 2big still ejects on its own at all times of the day or night. We've even changed the setting so the computer never sleeps. Nothing is helping this issue.

Side note, this started after updating from Mountain Lion to Maverick to Yosemite to Sierra. Never had the issue in Mountain Lion but once we started the updates, the ejecting randomly began.

What other external hard drive is recommended that has worked for others that doesn't eject as these Lacie's? Any help would be appreciated.

I'm having this issue, too. I backed up my 2011 iMac data (Mavericks) to an external LaCie Thunderbolt rugged drive with no problems. Then I upgraded to Yosemite and tried to copy the files back to the iMac. It will start the copy and get anywhere from 1.5 to 32 GB into the copy, then the copy freezes for about thirty seconds. After that time, the disks disappear from the desktop and I get the motherhood statement "Disk Not Ejected Properly". The issue isn't the drive - I can connect it to any of my other Mavericks computers via Thunderbolt and it will run all day long. Definitely a Yosemite OS problem. I've reset PRAM and SMC just to make sure, that's not the issue either.

EUREKA! Turn off Spotlight! Apparently, Spotlight must hammer the external drive and cause all kinds of problems. I turned off Spotlight for the external drive (added to the Privacy tab) and just transferred 34GB no problem.

Wow! That worked for me, too, at least this past night and so far this morning (somewhat knocking on wood here...). I've been trying to find a fix for my (brand new, but I've used Macs my whole life) iMac ejecting its Time Machine disk during sleep. I tried various solutions like scripts run with sleepwatcher and the trial of Jettison to no avail, and found this thread in a final attempt to find a fix that doesn't involve not letting the Mac go to sleep. Of course, I thought that Time Machine used Spotlight on its backup disks (in previous versions of OS X adding your Time Machine disk to Spotlight's Privacy tab gave a warning that it would still be indexing the backups, Yosemite didn't do that though), so this fixing the problem for me is a bit more interesting than with any other external disks. Glad to not have those "disk not properly ejected" notifications every time I sit down at my Mac.

It doesn't work for me. I'm using my WD mybook 3 TB. I use this HD also for apple. Time machine I turn all the spotlight off and put the HD to the privacy list. But it is not happen to my Other HD WD mypassport. Only For my WD MyBook. Please HELP....

Spotlight always "hammers" a new drive with lots of stuff on it - that's what it's supposed to do in order for you to use Spotlight to find things later on. Depending on the size of the drive and how much stuff is on it, this can take a long time and consume a lot of CPU horsepower. But eventually it will get caught up and cause very little "hammering" after that unless there is a LOT of things going on with that drive (lots of file creations and/or deletions) - things that would force a lot of work to get an up-to-date Spotlight database.

But I think Spotlight is designed to use CPU only when it's available - ie when CPU is not needed by other programs. In other words it shouldn't be a problem if other things are going on that need the CPU - the spotlight indexing is running at a lower priority so that if the CPU is needed for other things of higher priority, the Spotlight indexing gets pushed down on the queue so it doesn't compete with other stuff of a higher priority going on with the computer.

You can always turn off Spotlight (like pictureboy says) on any disk if you don't want to wait for it to be indexed, but don't expect to be able to use Spotlight to find things on that disk, either.

I just discovered I have this problem, too -- though it just appeared in the last 24-hours, and my last OS X update to yosemite was about 3 weeks ago. So it just sort of suddenly appeared. Has anyone tried disabling the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible option" in System Preferences > Energy Saver? I would kind of prefer to keep my external drives searchable, but I would prefer even more that Yosemite and/or Spotlight -- or whatever weird bug this is -- doesn't corrupt them by ejecting them improperly!

I've got this same problem... seems like its only happening with my 2TB USB drive which I'd like to be able to "search" as its one of my primary image storage drives. Its not ejecting my FW800 Lacie 1TB Time Machine.

So is it as simple to kill as typing the device name in the Privacy area of Spotlight?

I am having this issue on Thunderbolt external hard drives that are not my external Time Machine. I have a WD MyBook 4TB Raid 1 Thunderbolt external hard drive configured for Time Machine and OS X Yosemite never "puts it to sleep" or "ejects it". But my Buffalo Technologies 1TB Thunderbolt Ministation, randomly (or what appears to be randomly) will put the drive asleep, or randomly eject it and I get that annoying ejection message (why don't we have an option to "kill" seeing those messages...anyways). I can be actively working or the computer can go to sleep, there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason. The drive will come back once I unplug it and replug it back in. Architecturally, the Ministration is connected to the WB MyBook 4TB Thunderbolt, so it's the last in chain normally. But when I travel, I have I plugged the Ministation directly into the Thunderbolt port and still see the issue. Ruling out issues with the drive a part of a Thunderbolt chain.

I have a call into Buffalo Technologies (WORST TECH & CUSTOMER SUPPORT - I WILL NEVER BUY THEIR PRODUCTS AGAIN) but they are confused on the issue.

I have everything on the Ministation, documents, music, videos, many (but not all) applications. So the Spotlight workaround, though not ideal by a long shot - as I want the Ministation searchable, for now I will put it in the privacy tab to see if the issue goes away. If it does, then WE (like more than just myself) need to call this bug into Apple OS X Yosemite support so that they can release a patch to fix the issue.

I have a LaCie 3TB Thunderbolt drive arriving tomorrow that I will see if I have the same ejection issues. That will help tell me if it's OS X (if the LaCie randomly ejects/sleeps as well) or if it's the Ministration (the LaCie is stable).

It's an annoying issue for sure, and can not be operating as intended.

FYI...

The issue is still occurring despite putting the Ministation in the privacy tab for Spotlight. So the workaround didn't work for me. 😕

Having the same issue, I'm no expert but I am speculating there may be a hardware issue at play. All the same drives were working fine with my previous Mac Pro (never did this), upon moving the drives over to the Mac Pro (Late 2013) the issue began. I had Mavericks at first and it started occurring there, continues in Yosemite (I upgraded with hopes the issue would go away - no go).

Thanks for providing this solution, scratch that "work around" - I may try it just to test my theory on hardware but I need to search my drives so no access to spotlight search is an undesirable option. I am really just adding my two cents to hopefully help encourage Apple to help us with a real "Solution" to this problem vs the work arounds and to try and stay connected in case we have a widespread hardware issue. Its only happening to my USB drives (one drive more than others oddly, but periodically it affects all of them - all of the USB drives). Thus far it hasn't impacted my Thunderbolt connected drives so it seems to be USB only related issue on my computer.

I was having this problem. Three drives, two USB 3 and one USB 2,plugged into a powered hub. Moved the USB 3 drives to ports instead of the hub and moved the USB 2 drive to my AE to serve as a TM. Not had the issue since. True, it means more cables to plug and unplug every time I move the MBP, but at least I don't get the error messages.

I don't know... turning off spotlight for your external drive(s) doesn't sound like an Apple solution... what we need is a fix that will allow us to search external drives without turning Spotlight on and off. What confuses me is that this doesn't happen _every_ time my Mac goes to sleep... just seems random with no rhyme or reason.

Mike