"Disk Not Ejected Properly..." message when Mac Pro 2013 awakens from sleep

[Eric Brody]

I have a bunch of drives in an OWC Thunderbay attached to my 2013 Mac Pro (trashcan) running Mojave 10.14.6 (current). One of them is a 12TB Toshiba that I use regularly to back up my photo files from another drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. For no apparent reason, when the computer goes to sleep and awakens, I get the message "Disk Not Ejected Properly: Eject (name of disk) before disconnecting or turning it off."

When I awaken the computer and look at the finder, the disk is there, and it can be opened. It's neither disconnected nor is it turned off. I've shut down, restarted, the usual. I've run disk first aid on it and it's fine, as are all the other drives. The sleep settings in Energy Saver are set to the default settings. It's probably more annoying than serious (I hope) but I'm wondering if others have had similar issues.

[langier]

For years, the same thing as you.

When I walk away and leave my MP 2009 to its own for a few hours, it does the same thing. Usually no ill effects that I can find on my hard drive farm (several drives in a couple of JBOD boxes, and a couple of drives via USB 3.x).

I happened again a couple of days ago when I went for a walk and came back to wake my MP and get back to work. Same warning but all the drives were back on the desktop and mounted and I had to clear out about a dozen of those boxes.

But your posting got me to thinking I needed to check a Preference and I think I may have fixed it...

I guess I didn't check the "Energy Saver" in System Preferences... after updating to Mojave (or maybe one of the maintenance releases since) several months ago. My display is set for an hour and now I've reset the "Computer sleep" to "Never."

Give that a try and see if that may solve the issue.

[Eric Brody]

Thanks Larry, I appreciate your reply. I have a question though. My Energy Saver dialog does not have appear to have a "Computer sleep" slider. I too am running Mojave on a Mac Pro 2013 trashcan. I'm attaching a screenshot of my Energy Saver dialog. Could you comment on my settings and share yours? Thanks for your help.

[Eric Brody]

I suspect no one cares much about this topic anymore but after quite a bit of fussing about, it may be solved. I had a productive conversation with the folks at OWC/SoftRaid. We tried to determine if the problem was the drive or the enclosure. I have a Thunderbolt 2 connected Thunderbay 4, where the drive in question lived, and a Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbay 4 connected by an adapter cable, both to my 2013 Mac Pro (trashcan). With their guidance, I tried substituting another drive in the problem slot and all seemed well, I thought it was the particular drive, though it was an almost newToshiba 12TB bought from OWC in June. Long story short, once I put the drive into the Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbay, all was well. I've slept and awakened the computer a number of times and have not seen the dreaded message. I am hopeful I've seen the last of this problem.

[tsinsf]

I have an OWC external drive enclosure, also with a 12 TB drive (Seagate) connected by USB 3. I was having the same problem, after sleeping and actually shutting down and restarting I would get the " Disk not ejected properly" message. I had a talk with OWC and they couldn't help me and suggested I just need to buy a new enclosure. I have other drives connected by USB (not OWC) and don't have this problem. After researching online I have come to the conclusion that it is an enclosure problem, not a drive problem. The software in the enclosure doesn't play nice with the computer OS, in my case, Mac OS. I don't think it is specific to OWC drives. It doesn't seem possible to get any information from the manufacturers about how their enclosure deal with sleep and reboots. So it just seems to be a crap shoot whether or not your external drive enclosure will behave.

[langier]

Hi Eric,

Just found your question after my reply in July...

Whenever I did get the "Disk not ejected..." there was no issues with the drives or files and it was more a warning than anything to keep from simply unplugging drives and flash media without unmounting, especially when the media is updating which seldom happened when the system was sleeping...

In the mean time, glad your problem seems fixed!

Here's a shot of my Energy Saver panel and settings. My Energy Saver panel on my 2009 MacPro (flashed from 4,1 to 5,1) running Mojave is different than your panel on the 6,1. I'm guessing that the hardware differences between our two machines is the main reason that there are different options.