Yosemite ejects external drives

I Solved my problem with a LaCie ext thunderbolt2 HD by switching to a LaCie thunderbolt 1 ext HD. The thunderbolt 2 ext drives with multiple drives have a hardware RAID. By switching to a thunderbolt 1 drive it does NOT have hardware RAID. My current drive is a Lacie 25TB thunderbolt configured with Softraid software to a RAID 5 volume. Currently working for 3 weeks now. Drive not backed up with time machine.

Thanks Pictureboy.

I've had the same issue since upgrading to Yosemite. I use a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1TB drive connected to the FireWire 800 port on my MacBook Pro (2010). I have had the drive eject randomly ever since the upgrade, however when I plug the drive into the USB port it works fine. For me it's critical that I have this problem solved by Apple ASAP as I use my MacBook for public performance as a DJ and need to utilise the FireWire port and I can't afford to have my music stop in the middle of a track. Hopefully you get feedback from Apple that can be share to everyone or they include it in their next update.

The Spotlight solution seems to have worked for 2 of my 3 external drives, which is a big step forwards.

2009 13" MacBook Pro. Yosemite 10.10.2

G-Tech 4TB Thunderbolt, G-Tech 1TB mini Thunderbolt (seem to be fixed by the Spotlight fix). 64GB Nifty mini drive in SD slot (still ejecting unexpectedly).

I am having the same problem with my G-Drive mobile / thunderbolt on my intel iMac with current Yosemite. It only happens every couple of days though. I have never had spotlight on for the drive and I have always had putting drives to sleep unchecked under energy saver.

Finally found this thread and it's the only thing that has worked for me. My drives were ejecting over 5 times a day each! Even the drive I was using for Time Machine while it was backing up and encrypting! I have 2 brand new enclosures that are exactly the same. They are each an Icy Dock Blizzard external enclosure with a 6TB WD Red drive. I have them connected directly to My Mac Mini (late 2012) using USB 3. They are both Mac Journaled and encrypted. I went into Spotlight and added them to the exceptions and it helped some. Then I unchecked everything in Spotlight and the drives haven ejected in 3 weeks, Yeah!... and now I can't search over 5TB of information on my drives...

Solution in place so I can work. Check.

Massively troublesome solution that Apple needs to fix so I can FIND FILES AGAIN! Check.

I've been using Apple products since OS 8 on a beige Power Mac G3. This is the first time I've seen something like this hang out in their products without a solution from them for so long without a fix... and it's getting annoying.

unfortunately this solution doesn't work for me.. :-(

excluded my 3 external HDs from Spotlight and unchecked everything in Spotlight

but the disks ejecting still exists ...

very annoying indeed....

and this is an ongoing problem since maverick it seems...

Disk not ejected properly

Based off other suggestions, I also disabled the automatic setting of time, automatic setting of the time zone and unchecked to put the HDDs to sleep.

I also have my computer set to not sleep and for my display not to sleep. I have a hotcorner set up to to make the display go black and I manually turn off the monitor when not in use.

Not sure if this helps, but it does further explain what we are willing (which we shouldn't have to) to do to get drives not to eject randomly.

I have also submitted "feedback" to Apple about this. I'm just hopping the more people do, the higher up the problem will be put on the priority list.

Could this 'solution' work?

If i buy a (secondhand) airport extreme and use its usb port to connect my usb-hub with my external HD's to share them in my wifi network?

or will they be ejected this way too??

The suggested fixes are also not working for me. I've tried both excluding the drives from spotlight, changing the power saving settings and then restarting etc etc and I've still had four ejects in the last hour of backing up a Glyph 3TB drive via USB3. The first two hours of the backup worked fine and then......

Had the same problem with another Glyph 3TB drive yesterday, but thought at the time it was the drive. Now I know for sure it's Yosemite because I only just received my new iMac Retina 5K yesterday so this is my first time using any of my drives with Yosemite, drives that worked perfectly fine for the past year, until now.....so this is VERY annoying. Brand new computer with brand new problems. Very disheartening. Upgrade = downgrade. I'm in the process of cleaning up my drives/backups so I have to move a lot of data around so if I can't get this problem resolved I'm in real trouble. The risk of permanent damage to the drives is now really worrying me.

Any ideas anyone......

Add me to the list. my external USB drives connected via a USB hub are constanty ejecting when my late 2012 Mac Mini goes to sleep. It's very frustrating and has been going on for quite a bIt now. Nothing seems to fix the issue.

Same problem here, 2 WD external drives that are randomly ejecting

Ehi guys, same issue here. I have got a WD My Passport 1TB formatted HFS+ Journaled with a MBP late 2008 just updated to 10.10.3 (from 10.10.1).

This is the list of actions I took in the last couple of days. I think the source of my issue lies among these actions because the HD has worked fine for the past 3 years up to these very last few days:

1) I connected the hard disk to my new Synology DS215j to dump some of the data on it --> everything fine;

2) I wanted to mount the HFS+ HD as read/write on the Synology and so I removed the "journaling" option and connected it to the NAS. I was not able to mount it as read/write anyway. However, from that moment on I got the random ejects anytime I was trying to copy files from the HD to the NAS.

3) I updated my Yosemite to the 10.10.3 release

4) I decided to connect my WD to my Mac and try to copy my files to the NAS from my Mac. Then is where I realized that the problem persisted even when trying to copy any file from the HD to the NAS, to the Mac or to other HDs.

I have now re-enabled journaling and verified the disk (everything is fine) with disk utility. And I have updated the firmare of my WD My Passport. No solution.

I have browsed around some forums (apparently the issue started for some people already with Maverick) and I will try to: connect the HD to the MB Air of my wife (should be still on 10.10.1), reset SMC, remove HD from spotlight, check energy saving preferences to stop hard drive to go to sleep, remove any WD Smartware software from my Mac...did I forget anything?

Keep us posted if anybody gets a definitive solution!

oh it seems you updated to 10.3.3, which is when the problem started for me as well... maybe there's a link.

Count me as another who didn't see any issue until updating to 10.10.3. I'm going to look at some of the fixes proposed here and see if anything helps.

EDIT: Forgot to add that my external drive is a 1 TB Seagate connected via FW800.

Ehi everybody, a brief update from my side.

Last week I did everything I mentioned above: reset the SMC, removed HD from spotlight, change energy saving settings and removed WD Smartware software. Well, this helped at the beginning and I was able to copy some hundreds of GBs without any problem. However, after the first success the problem started appearing again but now it is really random.

For example I was able to merge to large iPhoto libraries (one of which on the External HD) with a process that took about 10 hours without any hiccup from HD ejects...

I have now recovered everything I wanted from the HD and I will try to format it to something that is more compatible with my Synology DS215j and hopefully that will improve matters.

Hope somebody finds a more stable solution!