Q: External hdd won't eject properly since El Capitan

Same issue here - just thought I'd make a comment, in the hope that once a fix is found, someone mentions how to do it on here!

My update, both of my external drives ejected with out an issue last night. Guess it's an intermittent issue now. Odd.

This thread helped me (so far) - adding the "metadata_never_index" file seems to have been the trick (for now).

>> Re: Disable spotlight for External Drives

Ref: Ever since El Capitan 10.11.1 my External Drives play hide and seek game with me:

You would not believe this message, but here what I received from Tech Support of G-Drive in reference with “Disk Not Ejected Properly”:

1) This message sometimes called error -50, (when after the drive been in active for a while) is indicative of the issue that the firmware was meant to address the self ejections have usually been a conflict between firewire controllers that the SMC and PRAM usually resolves.

2) if hard drive firmware update and / or computer resets have not resolved the problem of ejecting the drives, then other option is either to change connections to usb ; or last option would be a third party software to keep the drive awake. Keep drive spinning is a free software, Disksomnia is another program which can do that for multiple drives but cost about $10.

3) Unfortunately issues with firewire have affected the entire hard drive industry since apple has stopped supporting it in the last several versions of the Mac OS.

4) This coupled with the previous maker of firewire controller who were the standard going out of business and selling off the patents. The newer chips are a bit different and the firewire drivers on the macs have not been updated for newer controllers. While the firmware update fixes the issue for most, there are some machines where it is simply too incompatible.

__

I spent one week searching the web for anything to support the claim above.

I could not find a single evidence that since 2010 Apple uses Thunderbolt for only up to 8 devices in a chain including Mac itself, and that meantime Apple stopped supporting connection of Firewire devices (up to 63 devices in daisy chain).

I know many of us use only few drives, but I have hard time to believe that we are limited now to 8 latest devices, and must dump all  Firewire drives as incompatible. If that is the case why hard drive manufacturers, including G-Drive continue selling Firewire devices on their website and in the stores? I purchased my last 3 G-drives 2TB each 9 months ago from Apple store.

PLEASE Help me to find the truth: Did Apple indeed STOPPED support for Firewire 800 devices as Incompatible.

____

Meantime the problem of Ejecting Drives continuous for me. Spotlight metadata_never_index, Keep drives alive, changing cables - all are temporary solutions. The problem comes back and there is no pattern. I am tired of restarting my new MacMini computer 10 times a day.

Ref:

Posted by Koen Oct 13 2015 4:08AM - I got similar notifications for my 8 G-drives. Force Restart is my solution.

Posted by EVISCERATOR Nov 4 2015 11:24Am

Posted by derekfromwhangarel Nov 4 2015 3:16PM

Posted by Mike Lawrimore Nov 15 2015 6:54PM

Posted by Berting AP Nov 15 2015 9:08PM

Please share the latest news from Apple Support …

Is there any contact number to call  someone at Apple who is already familiar with the issue?

Hi Guys I am facing the same problem. Is happening with an SD card connected by usb adapter, but is not happening always.

I've got this issue yet I am still on Yosemite.

I had two partitions on a drive. Was able to eject the empty one, but the TM one wouldn't eject. Restarted and both showed up. Dragging the partitions to the "don't Spotlight index" pane worked for me, but as this "disk in use" error message has caused so much grief over the years, can't Apple just tell us, along with the error message, which program or process is causing the problem? Or suggest the Spotlight fix? Seems to me there are a lot of error messages that can be deciphered easily with some Googling. I'd think by now computers would be able to suggest actions that might fix the problem.

Do you think today's update to 10.11.2 will fix the problem?

I installed the update for EL Capitan but nothing about this problem mentioned in the info that comes with it. So a wait and see I think but feel that it has not been fixed in this update. Probably next time.

Well it still happens so no fix yet. Twice today already so maybe next update Apple will take care of it.

Mine is not a big issue really and often corrects itself or if not I enter TM and come out again and all is good after. Back ups look Ok too. So it's mainly an annoyance more than a problem. Still nice to have it fixed soon.

Thanks for your updates, Derek

This "cannot eject external drive" problem has been happing for me (mid 2014 MBP) since the El Cap release and 10.11.2 didn't fix it.  The problem appears to be that Spotlight is forgetting its list of external drives once they have been disconnected (possibly after the next reboot).  I can tell it's spotlight that's the culprit by using the little app "What's Keeping Me.app" which shows mds and mdworker are hogging it (I found the app via google and it works on El Cap.)  On at least some occasions, the Spotlight prefs in System Prefs won't let me re-add the external drive to the privacy list when it's indexing.  At this point I used What's Keeping Me to find the process IDs of the offending processes, and in Terminal, "sudo kill -9 nnn" where nnn is the PID (twice, for the mds and then the mdworker PIDs).  Then I can add the external drive to the spotlight privacy list, and also eject the drive.  I'm wondering if it's the sandboxing that won't allow the spotlight prefs to be updated properly.  I'll see if the problem reoccurs if I turn the new security measures off and see what happens. Certainly an unfixed bug. Why you would want to index the drive you use for Time Machine beats me. Thank you Apple.