Lacie D2 Thunderbolt 2 drives causes iMac to restart

Hi Darren

I have exactly the same problem 😟

Just bought the new 27" iMac 5k (Late 2015) and Lacie d2 Thunderbolt 2 6TB.

I'm on OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

How about your replacement drive? Any problems with that?

Happy Holidays
Lars

FWIW, I don't own a Thunderbolt 2 drive but, there have been various reports about the microcode for Skylake CPUs which could be at the root of the problem rather than with the drives themselves.

Can you link to any reports/discussions?

I have a Thunderbolt 2 external (OWC Thunderbay 4) that's causing restarts with my iMac 5k. Tested it on a Macbook Pro with no errors.

Not really. It's been months. The discussions weren't Mac specific at any rate and I don't know if that is related to your problem. If you do a search for "Skylake microcode bug" I'm sure you will get some hits.

Did anyone think of using OS X Disk Utility to reformat the drive as a OS X extended (journaled) with GUID partition scheme, first, before using the drive with OS X.

External hard drives are NOT formatted for Macs and OS X out of the box.

How a drive is formatted wouldn't cause a Mac to reboot. Macs can read/write to ExFAT drives, can read NTFS drives. Worse case scenario would be a Linux ExtFS drive and those would either not mount or a dialog asking if you wanted to format it would pop up.

FWIW, I have read reports just buying better Thunderbolt 2 cables has fixed some issues.

The First thing I tried was to order an Apple branded Thunderbolt cable... But same problem..no succes.

After explaining my problem to Apple, I bought another Lacie d2 Thunderbolt 2 drive from Apple Store.

I tested the new one intensely using Blackmagic Speed Test and found no problems using Thunderbolt.

Then I "cloned" the faulty drive (connected through USB3) to the new drive. After more testing I finally wiped the faulty drive and returned it to Apple.

I did contact Lacie support before I ordered the replacement drive. Here is their answer:

Thank you for contacting LaCie support. I am sorry you are having issues with your D2 Thunderbolt 2 drive. It does happen every once in a while that a problem in the Thunderbolt cable or the port on the drive can show functioning issues. If you have tried using a different cable with the drive with no success then I agree you should take it back for exchange. You can feel confident that this is a rare occurrence and the replacement unit should not be an issue.

Between the lines Lacie seems to admit that they have had problems with the d2 Thunderbolt 2 drive before.

Buttom line: The new Lacie d2 Thunderbolt 2 works fine, it's stable and fast and I'm happy again

The First thing I tried was to order an Apple branded Thunderbolt cable... But same problem..no succes.

After explaining my problem to Apple, I bought another Lacie d2 Thunderbolt 2 drive from Apple Store.

I tested the new one intensely using Blackmagic Speed Test and found no problems using Thunderbolt.

Then I "cloned" the faulty drive (connected through USB3) to the new drive. After more testing I finally wiped the faulty drive and returned it to Apple.

I did contact Lacie support before I ordered the replacement drive. Here is their answer:

Thank you for contacting LaCie support. I am sorry you are having issues with your D2 Thunderbolt 2 drive. It does happen every once in a while that a problem in the Thunderbolt cable or the port on the drive can show functioning issues. If you have tried using a different cable with the drive with no success then I agree you should take it back for exchange. You can feel confident that this is a rare occurrence and the replacement unit should not be an issue.

Between the lines Lacie seems to admit that they have had problems with the d2 Thunderbolt 2 drive before.

Buttom line: The new Lacie d2 Thunderbolt 2 works fine, it's stable and fast and I'm happy again

I have the exact same thing happening to me. Exactly, down to the letter. I just don't trust this drive any more given the number of people who seem to have this issue.

It works OK under USB3.

Same problem for me. My Mac just will not work with the D2 using Thunderbolt.

I reformat all connected drives OSX journaled. My D2 gets progressively worse when attempting to copy large files from it.