USB 3 ExpressCard Disconnecting Hard Drives Upon Sleep

Question

USB 3 ExpressCard Disconnecting Hard Drives Upon Sleep

I have a MacBook Pro 17" Late 2011, running OS X 10.10 Yosemite and have recently bought a USB 3.0 ExpressCard to enable me to finally connect a USB 3 Hard Drive to my machine with near USB 3.0 speeds. This ExpressCard works fine, the Mac recognises it and it works with my hard drive perfectly well, muchly satisfying me in the speed department!

However, I do seem to have a problem when my Mac goes to sleep. Now, if my MacBook goes to sleep I find that when I go to wake it, I get notifications saying that my external hard drive wasn't ejected properly. It then begins to remount as it wakes up. This is obviously a little concerning as I don't want the hard drive connection to be severed everytime my machine goes to sleep for obvious reasons.

I didn't get this issue when using my USB 2 ports. My thinking is that the Mac cuts off the power to the ExpressCard slot when it goes to sleep, which would obviously kill the USB 3 connection. I'm not sure if I am right in this line of thinking, but does anybody know how to prevent this issue from happening?

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), 17" Late 2011

Posted on Sep 14, 2015 1:35 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

justinjsc

Level 1

9 points

Oct 10, 2015 10:05 AM in response to adrian-polglase

I used to have a NEC chipset version, this never happened. Now that I have the FrescoLogic chipset (that works natively) this happens to me too. I think it's an OS X issue. Super frustrating, because I can't use the old NEC chipset card anymore, as Mac has locked out the possibility.

I wish they'd fix this issue.

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Answer 2

Oct 10, 2015 10:08 AM in response to adrian-polglase

I will admit, as a stopgap measure, I have been using the 'Jettison' app, which automatically unmounts and remounts external drives when sleeping and waking, which helps me prevent any data disasters. It seems to do the trick, but this is obviously not ideal!

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Answer 3

Oct 10, 2015 10:21 AM in response to adrian-polglase

OH! Well, that would prevent the annoying "you screwed up and unplugged your drive without first ejecting it!!! shame on you!" message I am always getting when the computer wakes haha. Thanks for the info, I'm totally downloading that until they fix this issue, though I doubt they'll ever fix it, because we're a very small minority of users who actually have this problem.

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