Yosemite ejects external drives

Dear All,

Just happened to me again -- my new WD My Book for Mac ejected itself while working with Adobe Bridge -- I got the disk ejection warning on the desktop, but it came right back up a few seconds later. This is a new one...now it ejects itself but comes back shortly...I just don't think the USB connection in El Capitan is able to keep up to proper speed.

Thanks for you updates Barbara.

I had a 3TB Western Digital MyBook which ejected itself as a backup drive from my 10.9.5 server, several times a week. It was stable for days on my 10.11.4 iMac, copying hundreds of gigabytes back and forth as tests.

Back on the server it gave problems again after a day.

Wanting to get rid of the problem, I bought a 5TB Toshiba disk and am now in the arduous operation of copying the 2TB of backup files to the new disk. So far the Toshiba Canvio Desk stays connected over several days, and the Western Digital has to be unplugged and plugged back in after copying several 10s to 100s of GB.

Highly annoying. When it's finished I'll probably send it in for warranty: I don't know if it's Apple's only fault.

Dear Aiello,

Just a word of caution -- I sent a brand new WD in for warranty repair and got someone else's beat up drive back -- they don't guarantee to return your drive, at least they didnt 't that time (several years ago). I'd call them first and demand that YOUR drive be returned, or a new one, not someone else's that;s all scuffed up and treated poorly.

As far as the brand of drive giving trouble, it seems that there's quite a variety of different brands that are ejecting randomly. I'd just watch it and see what happens over time before I sent the WD back.

Wow, how did you know? Was there still data on the disk, or was it just obviously used and not properly refurbished?

I once sent in a warranty drive to Seagate and got a brand new bigger one back! Should have stayed with Seagate (although one particular batch gave me weeks of trouble)

Thanks for you feedback, again

Dear Aiello,

It was obviously not my brand new drive but an older refurbished one, somewhat scuffed and worn. The refurbished one they sent me never gave me any problem, however, but it was very disappointing not to even get my own drive back. I have never sent in another one under warranty, but never had to -- until now -- maybe. But I'll certainly tell them I want mine back, not someone else's. Good luck. My experience with Western Digital drives has been mostly positive, and I'm sticking with them, despite that experience.

We seem to have drifted a little off topic here 🙂

this is not about single drives, warranties, who's drive you get back, This is about drives ejecting and its driving me crazy, I have three macs, a 27" iMac Retina fully specced, a 2015 Macbook pro and a 2014 Mac book air all running El Capitan and its happening on all of them, its happening on direct usb connected, its happening on drives connected to usb powered hubs, its happening on my two hw raid drives, its happening on all four of my external SSD drives, its random it happens when its idling at night, it happens when i am using the drives. Its getting to the point where the system is unusable. This has been going on for so long its ridiculous, as a software engineer for various factory hardware machines, faults like this are not all that hard to find with some traces and monitors to tell you what is going on, this is so common it cannot be hard for Apple to generate the issue.

I hereby volunteer to install debugging software in my iMac for you to log things so you can then get the logs and find out what is happening. i have recently got to the stage where as I an IT person I am no longer recommending Apple or OSx due to this bug. One thing of note though, boot one of my Macs into Bootcamp and I ran windows 10 on it doing various things over a weekend and it not once got a disconnection, so its not power related, its not hardware related its OSx

Please FIX IT

cheers

NicW

Agreed, I'm still having to unplug and replug my LaCie 2Big every time the system has been asleep.... 2 years on...

Has anybody seen an Apple official line on this? I suppose that would be like VW owning up before being caught... ;-)

I use a WD My Book for Time Machine.

I frequently get the "Disk not properly ejected..." message when my iMac wakes from sleep, but the disk will mount itself again without my needing to unplug / plugin again.

When the message occurs, the icon changes from the "Time Machine" backup to the the generic, yellow USB drive.

After Time Machine runs again, it returns to the usual Time Machine icon.

I've not seen any suggestions for a systemic "fix" for this problem. Could it be something with my Time Machine / Energy Saver settings?

I havr found a fix or workaround, plug in your USB hub then check in system profiler if its seen as a usb2 hub or usb3 hub, replace all hubs till they are only usb3 ones shown and the fault will go, this is known by Apple for a long time but remains unfixed.

NicW

In my case, my device is plugged directly in to my iMac, which is USB 3.0

Dear All,

At Western Digital's suggestion, I also plugged directly into my iMac 5K retina's USB ports, and the ejection problem still occurred, so the hub settings are not specifically causing my ejection problem. I just installed the 10.11.5 OS X update this morning -- let's see if that solves any issues.

Thought I'd add my 2¢ worth.

It's apparent, reading through the entire thread, that the eject problem happens in a WIDE variety of systems, connections and scenarios. I've had it happen on a 2008 iMac Snow Leopard and a late-2013 iMac Yosemite & El Capitan. I've tried every connection except Thunderbolt. No hubs.

I'm currently experiencing NO problems. Not sure why, but I'll report here in the interest of compiling information. Again, it was suggested to me by an AppleCare rep that updating my iPod iOS MIGHT have included a behind-the-scenes USB driver update that MIGHT have triggered a return of the eject problem. Since then, I arranged for a replacement of my 4-bay OWC HDD enclosure (via warranty), and have disabled Sleep. (I'll likely never update iOS again until this is resolved; it's just an iPod.)

And the eject issue has not occurred since.

No pressing need for Sleep here; my electric bill remains unchanged. I Shut Down at night anyway (habit). I don't use (or like) Time Machine. If that's the workaround here, that's fine with me. But I'd expect a Mac system to perform efficiently and securely. "It just works", right?

After a couple years of this, I'm convinced, as many others are, that this is an Apple issue. And yeah, it shouldn't be real hard to replicate.

Hope this helps.

Thank you for this valuable input, but in my case it happens in a Thunderbolt setup only (no USB external drives) and I have the feeling that Time Machine could be one of the culprit in the equation.

Dear All,

I do not actively use Time Machine for backup, so unless something connected with Time Machine is running in the background that is causing the conflict, this should not be causing my problems. I'm not a guru so don't really know what runs behind the scenes, but as I said, I don't back up my computer with Time Machine. Now we know that it happens with Thunderbolt as well, so another part of the puzzle in place. By the way, I haven't had many problems recently since switching most of my activity to my newest Western Digital MyBook...we'll see if one of the latest Apple software updates helped.

Barbara, did you install the latest iTunes update (12.4)? I've deliberately avoided it for now. I'm still wondering if a prior update to iOS (9.2.1) via iMac/iTunes might have triggered my eject issues some months ago.

I also read (unofficially) there will be a more substantial update to iTunes this summer, presumably to address publicized Apple Music and sync issues (I don't use either). I can wait for that update. Or I might not even update iTunes at all until there is a major OS X update.

Otherwise I'm still problem-free for now. I also don't use Time Machine.

Yes, the issue has been reported on T-bolt connections as well. Many scenarios.