Yosemite ejects external drives

Yep this worked. Got a 2TB GRAID that suddenly started ejecting after installing Yosemite OSX. Turned Spotlight off and bingo, backing up 500GB no problems!

Thanks...

I have a MBAir 2014. I wanted to use USB3 SSD for parallels VM's for various client work.

The drive is continually ejected by the machine. However, my external Thunderbolt drive is solid as a rock.

Forgetting the technical issues about my machine config. etc, lets use some common sense:

Apple gets paid for Thunderbolt drives and would really prefer you use one of these. No such joy for Apple with fast USB SSD drives. In fact, I can't find a reasonably priced Thunderbold enclosure that will cost effectively outperform my beloved Toshiba SSD.

So, what does Apple "not" do? They don't address the ejecting issue because it forces professional users to stay in their ecosystem and purchase Thunderbolt drives for stability ensuring we don't abandon Thunderbolt for USB3 SSD, which is cheaper for us, faster for us, but not in Apple's best interest to support.

Forget a fix from Apple until Thunderbolt is the clear performance winner over USB3 SSD.

..

Well, add me to the list of people with this problem; retina MBP 13retina (MacBookPro12,1) running 10.10.5

like many, my lacie 1TB thunderbolt drive drops out...but only when its attached via thunderbolt. when its on USB3 on mw OWC dock it does not.

Nothing to do with system sleep; it happens while using the drive.

now trying to turn various things off...

sigh.

... and after 3 weeks of bliss my eject problem returns.

OS X updates during this period are Canon Software / iTunes / Pro Video Formats. Apple, seriously ... 😠

I believe all of the "solutions" here are wrong. The problem appears to originate at a low level, probably in the driver for USB3 and Thunderbolt. It seems to occur with certain drive controllers, specifically the JMicron JM551/529 and probably other controllers. I have had this problem for several years on numerous revs of OSX starting with Mavericks. The only thing that cured it was switching to different enclosures/docks. I have repeated this several times. In particular, two multi-drive USB3 enclosures I have tried have problems as does a recent Anker USB3 self-powered drive enclosure and a powered Vantec enclosure. Once moved to several Chinese docks I use, the drives never self-ejected. over several years. I also have two Toshiba external USB3 drives (pre-installed in enclosures) that have never self-ejected. One has been in use about a year, the other for the last week. With the problem enclosures, I have moved cables around and tried all the settings changes people recommend, but nothing ever worked long-term except switching to the docks that worked, no matter what the drive or cable or settings for Spotlight or sleep.

This same problem occurs with some PCs, search enough and you can find identical issues. Look for JMicron USB3 issues to find other reports. None of this excuses Apple not working with Intel (who may be responsible for some of the driver code for both USB3 and TB) or the controller/enclosure companies to fix this problem.

I've been seeing this on both my old Macbook Pro Retina and my brand new one. Both running Yosemite. This machine is running 10.10.5

However, I don't need to let the computer sleep. It will unmount the drives while I am working. I will see the drive disappear from the desktop and get the error message about disconnecting without ejecting first.

Makes using this machine for work pretty difficult.

First, in case it works, how do I permanently exclude an external drive via Privacy in spotlight? Do I have to do this every time I mount an external drive or is there a way to make it permanent?

Second, has anyone found a way to do actual work while this problem is occurring?

Thanks for any help.

As I pointed out in the post directly above yours, none of these "fixes" work.

Gets worse in El Captain 😟

Apple, seriously...

______

Mac Mini Core i7 (Late 2012)

I've stumbled on something which I think may be significant ...

A search on generic OSX connection issues (TCP / WiFi) throws up some interesting hits about the following file:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist

Apple Level 2 recommend deleting this file and re-booting your Mac if you have network issues. I checked this file on my system. Lo-and-behold its in XML format, written to regularly and is apparently prone to corruption by certain system events. Most notably on my system I discovered it contains multiple entries for the Thunderbolt port(s) associated with my setup (Mac Mini / Thunderbolt Monitor / WD My Thunderbolt Duo).

Last night, I renamed the file and re-booted my system without my problematic drive connected. A new clean file is created by OSX. I immediately backed this up. I re-booted again with my WD External Thunderbolt connected and it became visible in the OSX Disk Utility (where I could not previously see it). The drive was previously disconnecting every 15 seconds which subsequently caused my Thunderbolt Display to panic / flicker (I've posted on this thread about stabilising after this event).

However its now been stable for over 24 hours. I wonder if anyone else having the disconnect issue(s) could try the same and report back?

a) Rename /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist

b) Re-boot.

c) Connect your problematic drive

d) Try re-mounting via Disk Utility (if it has not done so automatically)

Report back here. I am deeply suspicious of the files in this directory and wonder if this problem started when Apple started making them XML format (possibly during Mavericks lifecycle).

I tried this, after an hour I had eject problems. As I said above, this appears to be specific to certain device controllers and the driver that Apple is providing. It used to be an issue with Windows but appears to be fixed.

Here as well, the same problem. I have an iMac 27 5K bought this past June with a LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 1TB attached to it. Today I wanted to backup my Aperture library on it and no luck; I was always disconnected. Errors shown where the following:

- error -36, then boom disk eject

- aperture library still in use, which wasn't true, then boom disk eject

Happened as well with the backup of my iTunes Library:

- a specific file still in use, and then boom disk eject

It is a real pain in the ***, especially when you need to backup something that is around 500GB heavy.

Any help would be appreciated. I noticed that the bug was a lot more frequent since I updated to El Capitan; and that the restart process for the iMac is longer when the bug appeared.

Here is the Console print out:

15.10.15 00:39:41.000 kernel[0]: [ PCI configuration begin ]

15.10.15 00:39:41.000 kernel[0]: [ PCI configuration end, bridges 19, devices 18 ]

15.10.15 00:39:43.000 kernel[0]: [ PCI configuration begin ]

15.10.15 00:39:43.000 kernel[0]: [ PCI configuration end, bridges 19, devices 19 ]

15.10.15 00:39:55.000 kernel[0]: SATA WARNING: IDENTIFY DEVICE checksum not implemented.

15.10.15 00:39:56.000 kernel[0]: AppleRAID::newMember detected duplicate member AE5B650C-499C-4F0A-B1B9-06BDF91B2DAC in set "LaCie" (BEF8F406-D6A7-4C88-99F2-DFA49258B110).

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: Failed to issue COM RESET successfully after 3 attempts. Failing...

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: AppleRAID::completeRAIDRequest - error 0xe00002c0 detected for set "LaCie" (BEF8F406-D6A7-4C88-99F2-DFA49258B110), member E1C9E399-7DFE-498A-AAEF-2BFA1D50E470, set byte offset = 627313700864.

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: disk6: device is offline.

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: disk6: device is offline.

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: AppleRAID::recover() member E1C9E399-7DFE-498A-AAEF-2BFA1D50E470 from set "LaCie" (BEF8F406-D6A7-4C88-99F2-DFA49258B110) has been marked offline.

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: AppleRAID::recover() member AE5B650C-499C-4F0A-B1B9-06BDF91B2DAC from set "LaCie" (BEF8F406-D6A7-4C88-99F2-DFA49258B110) has been marked offline.

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: AppleRAID::restartSet - restarting set "LaCie" (BEF8F406-D6A7-4C88-99F2-DFA49258B110).

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: disk6: media is not present.

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: disk6: media is not present.

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: jnl: disk6: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x6

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: jnl: disk6: write_journal_header: error writing the journal header!

15.10.15 00:40:13.000 kernel[0]: disk6: media is not present.

15.10.15 00:40:14.000 kernel[0]: hfs: unmount initiated on LaCie on device disk6

15.10.15 00:40:14.000 kernel[0]: jnl: disk6: close: journal is invalid. aborting outstanding transactions

The error is now: impossible to continue because Aperture Library is in use. External disk ejects.

Sunset Smile try:-

1) Disable searching of the external drive by adding using System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy

2) Disable indexing of the drive with the mdutil command

-- open up a terminal session

-- type 'mdutil -sa' to identify volumes

-- type 'sudo mdutil -i off "[volume]"

-- reboot

-- run 'mdutil -sa' again to verify that indexing and searching are disabled for the drive

Report back here if you can.

Additional step suggested by another user ...

3) Open Disk Utility and run repair on disk / volume.