Help - Harddrives disconnecting on MacBook Pro Retina

[AndreasOberg]

I have had several problems with harddrives disconnecting on MacBook Pro. I'm new to Mac so maybe this is a known problem with known solutions.

I have
- 2 MacBook Pro Retina
- 4 GTech Raid Thunderbolts 8TB
- 4 WD MyBook 4TB USB3

I'm having trouble that the drives disconnect. Especially when the Mac goes into power sleep.
I have also had 4 drives recently begin to disconnect more and more and then never start again. Basically the harddrive is broken. It also happened to one of the GTech Thunderbolt Drives

Possible reasons I can think of:
- The harddrives were broken. But 4 of them in a short time?
- I bought 10 drives yesterday. And 1 of the MyBook is having this problem at sleep mode, another one I tried has no problems.
- The sleep mode should not be used with external drives. Maybe I should just turn it off?
- Mac has problems with external drives stability. Lots of posts on the internet about it.
- The MacBook is broken and destroys the drives

Now has anyone else seem similar problems like this. I'm used to having harddrives internally on PC but that isn't possible on portable setups so I need to figure this out.

Any help would be MUCH appreciated
/Andreas

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

I never sleep my computers with external drives connected. There's also a little checkbox in energy settings in system preferences about sleeping external disks, make sure that is off as well.

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

we had this issue once with an external drive that wasn't formatted to osx journaled (it was NTFS). disconnected at random until the drive was finally proper f-d. but this shouldn't be the case with the raid....

 

[Björn Benckert]

TB cables are a bit glitchy so you might also consider buying one or a few spare once. Cost about the same as the drive... nuts I think.

Sad that they did the connectors so small and not more sturdy.

 

[AndreasOberg]

Thanks guys
Bought 10 new drives in different configurations and testing. One of the USB3 keeps disconnecting at sleep while the others work fine. I'm using the sleep mode as a stress test.
The other drives kept disconnecting while running and then just died permanently. Can't recover them either. We lost the source drive and the backup within ours before we could move the data to a third drive so lost some good shots it seems.

Some lessons so far
- some drives will have disconnect issues, especially on Mac it seems from reading on internet. Buy disks that do not have reported problems with this
- Stress test the drives by going to sleep mode. Maybe by copying data to it to make sure it's not broken from the start.
- Use UFS+ format on Mac, seems to be the most stable
- Dont go to sleep mode on the laptops while connected to power.
- If the computer is not connected to a wall avoid using external harddrives, unless you have to.
- Use a third backup for the most critical data. I'm planning on using offsite backup so I will have the third data elsewhere.

/Andreas

 

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

We had the problem, but solely with USB 3 drives.

It happened a lot when we loaded off footage from an SSD from a Pix Recorder trough a Pix Caddy with USB 3. We never really had a problem: it disconnected, we re-connected and continue to do our business. Yes, sometimes we lost a bit of time, but with USB 3 speeds and a Pegasus Thunderbolt Raid, we're not complaining.

Until recently. Same thing happened, and the when we re-mounted the SSD, it just saw 0 items. We tried some data-recovery software, but at most we could get back some corrupted Quicktime clips, with green images etc.
SSD's from a Pix have a special format though, I think it's called UFD or something.

 

[Michael Romano]

I never sleep my computers with external drives connected. There's also a little checkbox in energy settings in system preferences about sleeping external disks, make sure that is off as well.

Definitely +1

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Not sure what's going on here, seems to be a large number of problem drives and drive related issues here. Are you having these issues on other systems or just this one Macbook Pro?

 

[Justin Quinn]

I'm guilty of both mistakes, but since correcting them, I have had no disconnect issues. Here is what I did...

1. Make sure you're using a PSU with 4 Amps. If not, it may start up, but will often disconnect. A lot of times people mix the G-Raid power supply with that of the G-Drive, which only requires 2 Amps. I had so many 4TB G-Drives laying around, that I frequently used the wrong power supply.

2. With GTech GRaids you can't let the computer go into sleep mode. If you do, then it will disconnect the drive. GTech rep told me this.




jq

 

[AndreasOberg]

Not sure what's going on here, seems to be a large number of problem drives and drive related issues here. Are you having these issues on other systems or just this one Macbook Pro?

Hi Jeff. I have mostly used on MacBook Pro so the problem could indeed be this laptop. Maybe the power is not stable that its sending out. Will see if any more drives die on this computer. If so then something must be wrong with it. What is your experience with external drives Jeff? Disconnects and so.
How would you actually work with external drives on more serious work? I'm getting concerned of all the problems I'm having. I'm used to having internal drives and they rarely have problems.

Best
/Andreas