Why is Apple so unresponsive to the "Disk Not Ejected Properly" messages that collect in numbers overnight or during the inactive day? This goes back to Maverick and if the net is any measure is epidemic with Yosemite

I tried "never sleep" - no joy. I don't have Firewire; using Thunderbolt.

One of the simplest solutions that seems to work most of the time is as follows...

Create a simple text file on the external drive using TextEdit

Save it to your Mac's documents folder or any other physical location on your Mac's System drive for that matter..

(Do not save it as an iCloud stored file to iDrive for example..)

Open the text file and minimize it to the dock...

Leave it that way and usually the disk will not eject accidentally....

Not the most elegant of workarounds i know but it does seem to work more often than not.

As for the cause?

Many of the newer external HDs have a Power Saving or "Green" mode engaged automatically which causes problems with recent OS X (and Windows i might add) versions... because it causes conflicts and forces the drive go to sleep when the OS wants to keep it awake, hence the 'Disk Not Ejected Properly' message.

Thanks for the tip, but if I understood it correctly it didn't work for me. Just to confirm, you're suggesting creating a text (RTF) file from my MacBook Pro in TextEdit and saving it on the external drive (not on my MacBook Pro internal drive) - right? That's what I did, then minimized the file to my dock, left TextEdit running, and closed my laptop cover until it went to sleep. Unfortunately, when I reopened the laptop I received the same error message about improper disk ejection.

PhilChris wrote:

.....and closed my laptop cover until it went to sleep. Unfortunately, when I reopened the laptop I received the same error message about improper disk ejection.

My apologies.. I didn't make something very clear.

This only seems to work if you do not put your Mac to sleep.... Allowing the screen to power down is ok but shutting the lid or setting Energy Saving to make the Mac sleep will not be helped by this method...

This solution is designed to prevent the Ext HD itself from powering down... via it's 'Green' or 'Energy Saving' firmware modes... no matter what power saving mode the Mac is in... Again, It will not help with certain Drives when the Mac itself is put to sleep.

Also, not all Ext drives are equal.... in regards to this issue. I've found that most modern and older WD drives seem to 'respect' the Mac's power saving settings where as many of the newer Seagate and Lacie (some of which utilize which use Seagate drives) ranges do not and therefore are more susceptible to this problem...

Furthermore, part of the issue may be to do with using a TBolt to FW adaptor... as the TBolt is sent a 'display sleep' command by OS X because it is also considered a Display Port... just to complicate matters... and some drives incorrectly interpret a 'display sleep' command as an 'All Devices' sleep command instead...

I had this issue myself when using the FW to TBolt adaptor..., again, when using FW800 connected Seagates.. but not with FW800 connected Glyphs and WDs....

Finally... While this has not been absolutely confirmed... Annoyingly enough it seems that Apple have attempted to implement fixes for this problem.. via OS X updates... However, prior to Apple doing so, some Ext HD firmware's were patched with work arounds and now that Apple have implemented fixes, the work arounds in the HD firmware, breaks... resulting in the problem re-occuring once more.

Note: Im not a techie person in anyway. This information was relayed to me from several, much more qualified, technicians... who did their best to 'translate' for me so I would understand... Therefore my descriptions above are in laymans terms and may not be strictly accurate in regards to terminology! 🙂

Cheers..

Nigel

Thanks, Nigel. I really do appreciate your taking the time to try figuring this out (as a "non-techie") and explain it. I'm sure it will help others bedeviled by this bug. In my case, unfortunately, it's precisely when I put my MacBook Pro to sleep (by closing the cover) that I want my external drive (and the Time Machine files on it) to stay mounted. So I guess I'll have to keep looking for a fix, or wait for Apple to do something about this. 😟

Cheers,

Phil

Hello boboday and others,

I experienced this problem in Yosemite when I first installed it too. I solved it using an SMC reset (Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac - Apple Support) as suggested by someone else here on the forums.

Update:

Creating a text file on the external drive and keeping it open didn't work for me, and I got a disk eject even though the MacBook Pro Retina never went to sleep.

Also, I have done several SMC resets for various reasons other than this, and the disk eject problem persists.

It only occurs with the USB 3.0 WD 1.5 GB drive on or off the Hiub, not with my other Thunderbolt external drive. Someone said that Yosemite had been fixed to eliminate the problem with the WD drives, except that WD had changed their firmware along the way to eliminate the problem (didn't work), but that the Yosemite fix, whatever that was, didn't work with the new firmware on the WD drives, kind of like the O'Henry story, The Gift of the Magi. OTOH, none of this may be true.

I am on the latest Yosemite, 10.10.3.

Thanks, etresoft! The SMC reset worked for me, at least for now. I can now close my MacBook Pro cover to sleep the computer without a bad eject of my LaCie external Thunderbolt drive, although the reset does seem to have slowed down my whole system for some reason. I don't know why some workarounds succeed and others fail, with different experiences for different people, but I guess the lesson (for now, at least, until Apple manages to fix the OS X bug) is to try them all.

"Also, not all Ext drives are equal.... in regards to this issue. I've found that most modern and older WD drives seem to 'respect' the Mac's power saving settings where as many of the newer Seagate and Lacie (some of which utilize which use Seagate drives) ranges do not and therefore are more susceptible to this problem..."

Actually, you'll find you can't blame the drives. I have two drives getting ejected. One is a brand new 3TB WD drive and the other is the original hard drive that shipped with my Mac. I replaced the original drive with an SD drive recently, and put the original drive into an exclosure. In other words, 10.3.3 is forcibly ejected a drive that used to be the controlling hard drive. I never had the problem under Mavericks. This is 100% Yosemite for me.

It is the drive controller, which is part of the enclosure, that causes the problem.

You may have been lucky with Mavericks. I get the improper disk ejection problem with Mountain Lion through Yosemite on my Mac Pro. The identical hardware never, ever exhibits this behavior when I'm booted from Snow Leopard. I have installed a utility called Mountain (from appgineers.de) on the other system drives, and that has been successful in stopping the improper ejections so far.

I still have this issue with El capitan I had replaced my USB drive but obviously the fault is with the Hardware not the software. My applecare is expired.

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