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Disk Not Ejected Properly

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HUGE AL

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 4, 2010
238
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Mac Pro 5,1 with one external drive hooked to the USB 3.0 port. Energy Saver settings puts the computer and display to sleep after 10 minutes; hard drives to sleep when possible; and wake for network access.

I know this has been discussed in previous macOSs, but is the only solution to eject the disk before walking away from the computer or changing the Energy Saver settings for the hard drives to never go to sleep?

It's annoying getting the message and I know it CAN damage the drive over time.
 
HUGE AL said:
Mac Pro 5,1 with one external drive hooked to the USB 3.0 port. Energy Saver settings puts the computer and display to sleep after 10 minutes; hard drives to sleep when possible; and wake for network access.

I know this has been discussed in previous macOSs, but is the only solution to eject the disk before walking away from the computer or changing the Energy Saver settings for the hard drives to never go to sleep?

It's annoying getting the message and I know it CAN damage the drive over time.
Click to expand...

That energy setting only applicable to internal HDD, not external HDD. For external HDD, you need some simple tool (e.g. Keep Drive Spinning) to avoid disk sleep.

Yes, there is no work around but eject the hard drive before "the machine sleep" (not before you leave the computer). If you don't want to (or cannot) do that manually, you can use "Jettison" to automatically achieve what you need.

Anyway, AFAIK, due to the MacOS will cut the PCIe slot power during sleep. It's impossible for any card to maintain connection to the external HDD. You either let it eject before sleep. Or let the machine never sleep.
 
I've used Macs for years and never kept external HDD mounted because I found them noisy. I just got an external Samsung T5 SSD and I keep it mounted because I've moved my photo library there and it's where I store my larger media projects on. After a few weeks of use, I've received the message that my drive was not ejected properly, a few times, but only twice in a few weeks. This makes me think it's a bug of some kind and after some looking online, seems to be a long lasting one.
The only good thing is that there seem to be no reports of data loss. I'm hoping it eventually just goes away with an update since that seems to be something that has happened.
 
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It's been a recurring problem for me (late 2014 5k iMac, lastest HS (updating as each version appears).

I have a TB external (OWC Thunderbay) always attached and, fairly regularly, a USB3 disk attached. Sometimes while actually working, I'd get what I thought of as "phantom" ejection warnings -- I called them that because Finder continued to show the disks mounted and they were always accessible.

Overnight sleep was guaranteed to produce ejections on wake.

I thought for a while it was my connections, but even after I used cable ties to lock all the cables down, nothing changed.

Finally, about a month ago, I said to hell with it so when I leave my workroom at night, I leave the iMac on. Never have had an ejection in the AM.
 
monokakata said:
Finally, about a month ago, I said to hell with it so when I leave my workroom at night, I leave the iMac on. Never have had an ejection in the AM.
Click to expand...

So you're just turning off all energy saver settings and keeping the computer running?
 
My Toshiba externals put themselves to sleep while I'm working. I would say most externals are probably built this way since they are connected to laptops, and sleeping vs spinning would save battery power. To be fair, I've unplugged externals from Windows computers without ever "ejecting" them when they were just sitting there, and haven't had one fail or be corrupted. Macs or Linux I do unmount them (to play nice) if I'm not going to be using them, and never just leave them plugged in. They're backups, not main storage.
 
HUGE AL said:
So you're just turning off all energy saver settings and keeping the computer running?
Click to expand...
Yes. The display sleeps, though. The system device is a SSD, so it's not as though anything's spinning in there.

It feels odd to me, but what am I supposed to do? I'd rather run the iMac continuously than risk many TB of data.
 
monokakata said:
The system device is a SSD, so it's not as though anything's spinning in there.
Click to expand...

You make a very good point here. My system is also SSD. Never thought that nothing is really spinning since I DO hear drive noises when it goes to sleep and wakes up...

Annoying how we have to work around this, though...
 
Heh. Same thing with me.

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013)
3.1 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB of RAM
250GB Apple SSD (boot) & HGST 1TB SATA (data), both internal
High Sierra 10.13.3

I have six hard drives plugged into an Amazon Basics USB 3.0 hub, and only one drive out of those six ejects improperly.

I left my iMac on and unattended (display sleep) for about two days and came back to see six notifications saying "Disk not ejected properly", all about this one WD My Passport drive. It worked totally fine on my Mid-2010 MacBook running Sierra 10.12.6. I don't get it.

I plugged it directly into my iMac and left it unattended for about five hours, seems fine so far, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

EDIT: Yep, woke up this morning to one of those bloody messages
 
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Yeah. The messages are sporadic. They stopped after I plugged it into a powered Anker USB hub, and then the messages started up again. It's annoying because I really don't want to leave the Mac running all the time, and the hassle of ejecting the drive every time is more annoying than the message since it's a drive I need to use all the time. The risk of losing data is super low as well. Anyway, lets hope that after 6 years, the bug will get fixed...
I tried turning off power nap, but I'm not hopeful.
 
Having this issue as well on iMP 10.13.6. Very annoying. It is random too. Doesn't happen every time the machine sleeps. No rhyme or reason.
 
Since I last wrote, I switched to an iMac Pro and put my disks in a Akoitai TB3 enclosure . . . no difference. Still ejects.
 
HUGE AL said:
It's annoying getting the message and I know it CAN damage the drive over time.
Click to expand...

If you mean corrupt data, then yes.

Kawawolf said:
To be fair, I've unplugged externals from Windows computers without ever "ejecting" them when they were just sitting there, and haven't had one fail or be corrupted.
Click to expand...

I have lost a number of disks to corruption in MacOS over the years when not ejected properly.

angelofioren said:
Anyway, lets hope that after 6 years, the bug will get fixed...
Click to expand...

I am not sure it is a bug on the Apple side. My experience has been that it is a firmware issue on the external drives. I had one 5 disk JBOD enclosure that frequently gave me this error. When I replaced it with another manufacturers 4 disk JBOD the problem went away.
 
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