Disk Not Ejected Properly macOS Sierra

I understand what you were talking about. I had solved this issue a year ago, but when I recently rest my SMC and VRAM it started again, as a number of items return to their default. As I recall from my research a year ago, the issue is due to spotlight. I believe the work around this prior thread suggested was to go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy and set any connected external hard drives as unsearchable. This may be an alternative solution to the one suggested by Filtro.

I've been getting the same problem with an external SSD after connecting via a new USB3 card in my MacPro (mid 2012, Sierra 10.12.6). What type of connection is used for your drives? And are they independently powered? I'm presuming its via USB 3.0 connection? (I don't know if the problem occurs in USB 2.0). Only seems to occur when waking from sleep mode.

I've had no issues at all connecting the drive with Firewire 400/800 (or any other drive in fact via FW), but wanted to get a bit more speed with the SATA 3 SSD via unpowered USB3 external enclosure, and that's when the issue "Disk Not Ejected Properly" started. It also seems to occur while waking the computer from sleep mode, rather when the sleep is initiated, because if you eject the drive prior to going to sleep the message still appears on waking when the drive remounts.

My first work around was to uncheck System preferences>Energy Saver>Wake for network access (while also setting the Computer sleep to Never, and then System preferences>Bluetooth>Advanced>uncheck Bluetooth devices to wake computer. So far if I manually unmount the drive first, then manually set computer to Sleep, then when re-waking the computer via the main power button I didn't get the message - although I haven't tried over a longer period like overnight. I'm not sure this will help if you are logging out rather than just sleeping the computer though.

Its probably best to eject the external drives before putting the computer to sleep/logging off. I've used Automate.app to create my own APP to do this for me (really useful if you have more than one drive):

Open Automate, and select Application for the type

Drag in Get Specified Finder Items, then drop in all the drives you want to automatically eject into this

Drag Eject Disk command below it and save the app to your desktop.

(NB. I've added Quit Quicktime first because I often have a video open which might prevent the disk ejecting while its reading a recent video file). The limitation is that you can't do this automatically on Sleep, you have to double click your app first. Without spending money on a 3rd party software thought this might be a decent enough option.

The other thing I'm going to try is USB3 powered docking station (under £30), which also has its own off switch. Which I hope will resolve the problem altogether (seems power related when USB drops in sleep mode), if the problem continues I can at least still eject the drive and switch it off. I'll keep you posted on the outcome if that helps. I've never lost any data (yet!), the message is annoying at best, and worrying when you rely on a drive to access important files.

I have been having this same issue since upgrading my iMac to Sierra. I have Time Machine backing up to an external Maxtor Onetouch USB drive. I have tried all the suggestions mention in the forums here. None of them stopped the "Disk not ejected properly" from appearing upon wake up. A year later I am researching again.

From my research and testing, I suspect this is a timing issue where the iMac (default: sleep mode not hibernate mode) wakes up quicker than the External USB drive can spin up and respond. It seems this would be an easy fix for Apple to address. However, due to the history of discussions, they do not appear to be interested in doing such.

Considering my suspicions of the cause of the issue, I concluded the following power save settings would be the best solution to address the issue while still utilizing the most of the power save options of the iMac. This did indeed get rid of the nagging "Disk not ejected properly" message for me. I hope this helps others.

Go into System Preferences ->Energy Saver

1) Set Computer to never sleep,

2) Check the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible".

3) Set "Display sleep" to desired time.

This combination of settings will allow the hard drives and monitor to sleep, which is what uses the most amount of energy, but allows the RAM and processor to maintain power.

Interestingly I may have solved this for me, Apple suggested to de-install Little Snitch and Sophos which did not make any difference however the next step was to delete all log in items and interestingly since I have done this my HD's are no longer enjected.

I now started to add back and so far have DragThing, Dropbox and DD assist back running without issues.

will monitor but so far 3 days and no ejection.

cheers

steve

Tech support can’t fix the OS. I don’t understand how it can have gone on so long without anyone on the OS team seeing it as a problem.

But another variable is that so many folks are using external drives from Seagate and WD that are housed in enclosures of dubious quality. Any random disconnects that they see could be caused by a bad drive, bad enclosure, or bad cable rather then the OS. If a drive is completely fine when attached to a PC, then you at least know that the drive itself is OK.

Those cheap externals are not easy to pry apart, but to rule out the enclosure as the source of disconnects, you’d need to try the drive in a dock or different enclosure. It’s a good idea to have spare cables around, too.

My money is on the Mac OS as the culprit in a lot of the improper ejection scenarios, especially the ones that occur when the system is waking from sleep, but I’ve seen bad cables or enclosures cause problems, too.

OK guys here it is.

THIS WORKS 100% i hope you trust me.

tl:dr TURN OFF/ON spotlight

Full explanation

I have several drives, NTFS/ FAT 32, which i use thru paragon. I have a few times either closed the laptop or just yanked out a drive, and then it wont show up, i am able to see it in the devices of PARAGON, but they won't show up in FINDER. I try to repair them thru disk utility, also doesn't work. I did not even try to use all the external apps people recommend.

The reason why this happens has to do with indexing, which work thru spotlight. Spotlight is a service that helps you index all your drives to make them searchable. When you yank out the drive or close the laptop without ejecting, spotlight gets a little ********.

The only way that i have been able to solve this is by turning off and on spotlight. BUT please read on.

1.TURN OFF MAC. UNPLUG DRIVES

2.TURN ON

3.DO NOT plug the HARD DRIVE YET!!!

4.TURN OFF SPOTLIGHT

!!!!WAIT!!!! i cannot explain you how important is this part. indexing takes time

give it at least 10 minutes. this is an insane exaggeration and less should be fine.

5.TURN ON SPOTLIGHT

6.PLUG THE DRIVE

!!!!WAIT!!! this time give it really a good 10 minutes, depending how big your drive is. then it will just show up

here is a guide on how to turn off/on spotlight

http://osxdaily.com/2011/12/10/disable-or-enable-spotlight-in-mac-os-x-lion/dd

Its a waking up issue - but to be fair it takes me a few seconds to know what's what immediately after waking up from a sleep!

Just to follow up, yes there is no cure just a few altenatives:

1) you never put your system to sleep (only the display) in system preferences

- which is okay but for me still eats a bit of power than is desirable.

2) you use a Firewire drive or dock

- great up to now but speeds are lagging a bit against newer SATA3 USB3 alternatives

3) Find a drive or docking station that you can physically switch off, i.e. eject the drive from the system first and switch the drive off, then you can safely sleep the computer without that annoying message ever reappearing with peace of mind.

4) you add another internal drive instead -

Only good if you have available slots in a mac pro, but inconvenient for travel or a system failure event

I've opted for option 3 so that I can still get SATA3 speeds, so a quick eject and power off is real no big issue, its just getting into the habit of doing this.

Just out of interest I've tried this on USB3 Orico twin docking station (which can also independently clone a drive - not tested this feature yet, but that could save a lot of hassle on upgrading a system drive). I can switch the power off after ejecting the drives, and all seems pretty quick and stable on an SSD.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00NP42PWE/ref=cm_sw_r_em_apa_89NuAbH69X817

🙂

This is a long, sad story that might have a happy ending.

About 8 or 9 months ago I got a new MacBook Pro 13-inch, 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) Ports running OS Sierra. I had three very old external disks connected through a large hub for USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire, etc. Not too long after I started using the Mac, I began to get disk not ejected properly messages.

I would remount the disk(s) and run Disk Utility to see if there was any disk damages. Usually there were not. If there was I would use Disk Utility to repair the disk.

But eventually I kept getting the messages more frequently. And one of the disks (Time Machine) would not remount. I brought it to a tech repair shop which reported there were quite a few unreadable sectors. They could not restore the disk, but if I wanted they could try to copy one or two items. I gave up on the disk.

Based on comments here and elsewhere, I bought two Blackbox Pro dedicated USB-C external drives which were plugged directed into the MacBook. No hubs!

The error messages started soon after and increased in frequency. I had set every one of the energy saver prefs as recommended here.

I also got a utility called Amphetamine (used to be Caffeine) which forces disks to never sleep. I also got Jettison to ensure that the disks are ejected and mounted correctly.

Glyph Technologies said the only time they have seen this type of problem is if the data is corrupted. There has been at least three others with the same issues. Glyph told me that Disk Utility would not help and that I should buy Disk Warrior. I ran Disk Warrior on the volumes of the disks. It reported some problems. I ran DW repairs. It reported the problems were fixed.

I also bought new USB-C cords which plug in with a slight click that the other cords did not do. I also noticed that one of the USB-C ports feels slightly loose. It could be that the plug wobbles enough that the Mac thinks it has been disconnected.

So having done all of the above, it's been about 6 weeks since I ran DW. And I haven't had a ejected-error message.

The problem could (she lowers her voice to a whisper) be fixed. Could. But I don't want to remove any of the utilities or cords or change anything to find out what might have been causing the problem.

I just want my disks to backup and hold old files.

Oh, one more thing. I now have a cloud-based backup service for one of my disks although it can't backup Time Machine.

Well, I'm back. The Disk Not Ejected Properly (DNEP) errors kept getting more and more frequent. So much so that I backed everything up (difficult when the disk kept failing) and went to Apple. (Fortunately still on Apple Care.)

I thought it would be just loose ports. But it had to go to Apple.

Turns out they gave me a new logic board, (but didn't tighten the ports).

It's been over a week, and there have been no error messages. Even without the utility that kept the disks spinning.

This problem has been around for a while. On my Mac Pro, it started with Mavericks, IIRC. I installed a utility called Mountain from appgineers.de, and that solved the problem with sleep and disk ejection. However, I haven’t spent enough time in Sierra to confirm that it works with that OS, and I no longer allow that system to sleep so can’t guarantee that it will work for you. With one exception, the drives attached to the Mac Pro are in powered OWC enclosures, FW 800 and USB 3.

Yes, you are right.

Posts about the bug have occurred through several OS releases. Some people, not surprisingly, think that the upgrade they just installed is responsible. If you’re upgrading from something like Mountain Lion and jumping several versions, it probably seems like it is just the newly installed OS that is at fault, since you skipped several OS versions that also had the problem.

We have to hope that leaving feedback gets someone to finally address the problem. But in the meantime, Mountain (from appgineers.de) has worked really well for me.

I believe by not waking for network access and disabling Bluetooth waking just prevents the computer from being disturbed during a sleep mode. Each time the computer wakes even briefly causes a new Disk not properly ejected message to appear, some users were getting multiple messages because of this. And yes this would likely effect any connected device such as an Apple TV that requires network access through it.

The problem is the speed at which the USB drive gets itself ready from a low power state.

Your best option if possible is eject the usb drive and switch it off after you have finished with it. If you are using the usb drive networked with your Apple TV and you don't want the message appearing every time the Mac wakes, you might want to consider a FireWire drive or docking station, these aren't effected by the issue.

Hope that is of some help.

Turns out it's definitely the OWC dock's incompatibility with 2017 & 2018 MacBook Pros - when they sleep, it powers down and drops the drives. Terrible design and no warning from OWC.

Additionally, I had an eject-on-sleep issue prior to getting the OWC dock, but it went away after I replaced my SIIG hub with an Orico hub, upgraded my Mac Pro to High Sierra, and stopped using an old black plastic LaCie USB 2.0 drive. That drive still generates the error on sleep, but my other, newer, LaCie drives don't. In any case, all's well now with my Mac Pro. Go figure. I still have to prevent my MacBook Pro from sleeping, due the the OWC dock's faulty design.

Hello,

I have exactly the same issue since upgrading to Sierra and now in High Sierra, and it causes constant issue with my 3 Drobos and my Promis raid as they dont like to be force ejceted and it corupts the file system. For me it happens with USB3 and Thunderbot devices.

I do video and often have FXPX running over night to render and then find my project gone as the disk ejected.

Regards

Steve

I have a late 2015 27" iMac 5k running 10.12.6

I've been using an external 1TB WD My Book Studio FW800 drive for years with no issues.

I use it for music projects with Logic.

The WD drive is connected via a FW>Thunderbolt converter.

I've had the 5K iMac for about 6 months and before that had a mid 2012 27" iMac which had FW connectors, with the same external WD drive (with no issues)

Suddenly, in the last week, I've started getting the "Disk not ejected properly" messages.

And this morning the HD just disappeared from the desktop without being ejected at all.

A restart got it back and right now I'm backing it all up to a new portable drive just to be safe.

I haven't done anything weird to the best of my knowledge.

I use Onyx and have bootable clone backups via SuperDuper.

I shut down every day (not staying on in sleep mode) and eject the WD drive and power it off each time I shut down.

It makes me think the WD is about to die but having read this thread it seems it is a macOS issue.

I'm contemplating finally going to High Sierra but I would like to sort this out first.