Comments on: 10.5 certain external drives not mounting after restart or sleep; 10.4 …after sleep

By: David

David — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:28:56 +0000

@Cory Just throwing my experiences in here, adding to list of issues, I have experienced the same issue with the Iomega. I do not have the issue with my Lacie drives and I have about 10 of them. BUT I have had four power supplies fail on the Lacie drives. I went on line to Lacie, to buy replacements and for the longest time they were out of stock, which tells me that I am not alone in having this issue. I can understand that components fail but to have a 40% failure rate seems WAY excessive. I was going to go for a drobo and then I read all sorts of nightmares about them. Someone knowledgeable told me to hold out for "Windows Home Server" and this was from a MAC guy. Any experience with this? I am a photographer and have far to many hardrives, but can not afford a major investment of a true server.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:39:52 +0000

I found you via Google, and my problem is similar, only with a couple of new wrinkles. I’m using the Acomdata E5 500GB (USB2/Firewire 400) exterior drive under Win XP Pro, SP3. I’ve tried changing cables, USB ports, tried a powered USB hub, etc., and the thing keeps “falling off” the USB bus every few minutes. I was trying to write a disk image to it, and it would fail w/ a read error. Simply copying of sample (large, multi-GB) files produced the identical read error. The drive is *visible* in My Computer, but trying to open/explore it produces the incorrect message that the drive is not formatted and asks if the user would like to format it. A combination of power cycling the drive (after safely “removing” it from the USB bus via Windoze first) and/or rebooting the computer brings it back, seemingly accessible. Some minutes later, it drops off again (i.e., becomes unaccessible, though “visible”). Sorry to hear these are considered cheapies; I was encouraged by the fact that the drive itself is a Western Digital 500GB unit that seemed like it would be “reliable.” Any advice? Would appreciate your input, as you seem quite knowledgeable. Oh, OF COURSE THE WARRANTY’s almost elapsed! ;o)

By: player

player — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:54:32 +0000

I have a similar problem at least since Tiger with an mp3 player (Trekstor iBeat organix something). It sometimes works well, at other times it shows up in System Profiler, but neither in Finder nor anywhere else (e.g. formatting software).

With Tiger, this seemed to be caused by an iMate and its driver (OK, that *was* officially incompatible, but worked for a trackball), with Leopard I did not test systematically.

Annoying.

By: brian

brian — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:05:50 +0000

Fred,

Thanks for the info! I’ll be sure not to buy Cosmos HC-3502H’s in the future. Any problem with any other enclosures by Cosmos? I’ve actually never heard that brand… which backs up another train of thought behind this problem – don’t by the cheaper/cheapest (which is what I usually do). This must be another cheap-o with the poorer quality chipset.

FYI… I recently bought the NewerTech Mini Stack V2, similar to the HC-3502H. Although it worked fine for about 2-3 weeks, it suddenly died 2 days ago. It was not cheap, and certainly not the cheapest, and still had a problem (although not the same one related to this thread). Called NewerTech who told me to get an RMA # from the support section of the web site… yea, too bad that doesn’t exist!!

Frustrated!

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:29:13 +0000

I have a Cosmos HC-3502H ext drive case/USB hub that can be seen here
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HC-3502H&cat=CAS
with a 250G WD drive I installed. It exhibits the same problem when coming out of sleep mode – but not every time the Mac wakes up, maybe once a day or so…sometimes more, sometimes less.

I tried unchecking the “put hardrive(s) to sleep” option…didn’t make any difference. Only thing that brings the drive back is a power cycle of the case.

By: Cory

Cory — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:39:43 +0000

You are correct. There are 2×500gb drives in the enclosure in a RAID-0 (stripe) configuration. I keep everything on that drive backed up on DVD, so it works fine for me. The thing I like about it the most are the fast transfers. I average ~65MB/sec with this drive which is great! Compare that to ~20MB/sec on USB 2.0.

There really is no comparison…

The Mediasonic enclosure lets you choose either RAID-0 (stripe) or RAID-1 (mirror). Given the cheap price (and falling daily) of HDDs these days, there’s no excuse not to go with a RAID-1 configuration for extra security for your external drives, but in some situations, RAID-0 is fine as well.

Remember the golden rule, backup, backup, backup!

By: admin

admin — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 04:08:52 +0000

Hi Cory,

Thanks for the info! Good to know I’m not the only one. I think you’re definitely correct about buy cheaper enclosures.

If you don’t want to give up yet, you could look in Console to see if it’s giving you any strange messages when the drive is plugged in. That may help determine what’s needed to get it back up.

One word of caution about those big Lacie drives. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m quite sure they have 2 individual drives inside (at least they used to).

They are using a proprietary hardware RAID to make both drives look like 1. This means, when 1 drive dies or goes bad, the other drive goes down also and you loose everything. And because it’s a hardware RAID, with half the data on one drive, and half on the other, it’s almost impossible to do data recovery (MAYBE Drive Savers could).

In summary, having an external drive with 2 drives inside doubles the chance of the external drive dying when compared to an external drive with 1 drive inside. And it’s harder to recover the data if/when it does die. You may be fine, but i’d be sure to back it up daily.

I’m going to google the Mediasonic HUR1-SU2FWB now, thanks for the tip!

Brian

By: Cory

Cory — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 03:06:17 +0000

I have the same enclosure (Acomdata B 112 Rev1.5) and I’ve had the same issue with it since I’ve owned it. I just tried messing with it again today, and I can’t get it to show up at all anymore, even after unplugging it and leaving it off for a while.

I used to have to turn it off then back on, and it would ‘wake up’.

It’s been plugged in to my late-2007 24″ iMac for the last 6 months or so, but in stealth mode :)

Since it’s a pain to have to keep turning it on and off I haven’t been using it at all.

I think now that it’s unplugged I will just retire this enclosure and chalk it up as a lesson learned and stay away from the cheap enclosures. USB is a terrible interface for HDDs anyways. I’m going to grab another FW800 case and call it a day. For me, it’s just not worth the hassle and I don’t think a solution is to be found anywhere. :(

My 1TB LaCie BigDisk Extreme+ (via FW800) has been wonderful, but it’s just about full with less than 30gb remaining. Highly recommended.

I’ve been looking around for a new enclosure for some of my existing drives and I think I’ve found one that looks promising:

Mediasonic HUR1-SU2FWB on which I’ve read a positive review and they can be had for a reasonable price on eBay.

Good luck!

By: admin

admin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:55:14 +0000

thanks for the comment dave!

do you happen to know the brand/model of the enclosures that couldn’t sleep properly?

do you know if they had the same problem with restarts?

was this in 10.5 or 10.4?

thanks!
brian

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:14:00 +0000

I had the same problem with my previous two put-together external hard drives. It turns out that a lot of hard drive cases are not ’smart’ enough for sleep mode on the computer. With my Lacie drives now, I can easily put my (Leopard 10.5.2) to sleep, and when I bring it back to the land of the awake, the drives are still happily working.

Nice website by the way, just found it by ‘accident’ (you wrote the name in a TUAW comment, I googled).