Mac – External hard disc not ejected properly

external-diskmac-minisleep-wake

I have a late 2012 Mac mini running OS X 10.8.2. My iTunes library lives on an external Seagate drive, which has its own power supply. When my Mac mini goes to sleep it will frequently wake up with the familiar message"

The disk was not ejected properly. If possible, always eject a disk before unplugging it or turning it off.

After looking around on various forums I have tried turning off the "put hard disks to sleep when possible". This seemed to make the problem occur less often but it still occurs.

The only way to fix seems to be to reboot the Mac mini.

Is there a way to stop this or to auto-reconnect the drive when it wakes from sleep?

This problem coupled with the fact that half the time the Mac mini won't wake up at all is really bugging me! My MacBook Pro works great, but the Mac mini is a pain!

The external drive is a Seagate STBV2000200 Expansion Desktop.

Best Answer

It's one of the major flaws with newer seagate drives (alongside no on/off switch so you have to pull the power cord out the back and risk damaging the disk). They are just not compatible with Macs unfortunately. They go to sleep and there's no way for the Mac to reconnect to them. I've contacted Seagate about this and they said "Sorry there's nothing they can do about it, perhaps I can contact Apple and they can do something about it". Great..!

I basically don't buy Seagate any more and don't recommend Seagate to any friends or family with Macs. They just cause too many issues.

I'm using 10.6.8, I've not tried 10.8.3 as poster above suggests.