Q: external hard drive connection
Facts:
I'm having trouble keeping an external hard drive connected to my AirPort Time Capsule (running version 7.7.3). I have a powered external hard drive connected via USB to the AirPort. Typically after a reboot of the AirPort, my MacBook Pro (running 10.11.4 El Capitan) will see the external drive under my Shared devices in Finder and is able to read and write with the drive. For this discussion, I have my iTunes library on the external drive, so each time I was to open iTunes on my MacBook Pro, I have to make sure the external drive is mounted/connected so iTunes can access the library.
Problem:
If the drive isn't used for a while, I have to reconnected to drive. To do that, I open Finder, click on Airport Time Capsule under Shared and wait for the the drive to appear in the main finder window. The problem I run into is that 1) the external hard drive never appears as a drive on the AirPort, thus I can't connect to it, or 2) the drive appears and when I click into it, I get an error message saying "The operation could not be completed because the original volume could not be found."
My Attempts to Solve:
The only solution I've found is to restart the AirPort from the AirPort Utilities menu, and restart my Mac at the same time. After they both boot up again, I am able to connect to the external drive properly and can work with it. Sometime after this -- it's been as short as a hour or as long as two days -- the drive will "unmount" and fail to connect again.
I've tried using different hard drives to see if it was a drive hardware problem, and the error occurs on different drives (all of them are powered drives).
Thoughts:
I thought it could be related to the external drive spinning down after a period of inactivity, but I haven't been able see if that is case. Again, the only way I can get the drive to reconnect/re-mount is to the restart the AirPort
AirPort Time Capsule, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4)
Posted on Apr 18, 2016 9:50 AM
Unfortunately, a number of drives are designed to power-down when not in use. This is typical of "green" drives. I believe most external USB drives are in this category.
Something that you may want to consider. You could mount the drive when you startup your Mac by adding a script to your login. I do this for my "home share" drive and this seems to solve the problem for me.
To mount your drive at startup, create an AppleScript, and then, use System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items to run it at startup.
The script should look something like:
(Note: This script assumes that you share out the USB drive with a disk password.
try
mount volume "smb://<base_station_name>.local/<disk_share_name>" as user name "<you can enter anything here>" with password "disk_access_password"
end try
Posted on Apr 18, 2016 3:22 PM