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Has External Drive Issue With Mavericks Been Fixed?

nightlong

nightlong

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 16, 2012
864
168
Australia
Can anyone tell me if the issue with Mavericks destroying external hard drives has been fixed?

I have upgraded my old iMac, and Mavericks is running well on that but I haven't tried backing it up with Time Machine because of that issue, and I haven't yet upgraded Macbook Air because of this. I'd like to upgrade the Air. I'm not concerned about other bugs in first version of Mavericks, just this hard drive issue.

Forgot to mention what my external drives are:
For Imac, a Maxtor. For media for both, Toshiba. For the Air, small size Seagate FreeAgent Goflex partitioned with CC and Time Machine, and a larger Seagate Goflex drive with just Time Machine.
 
Last edited:
SandboxGeneral said:
I have several external HDD's hooked up to various Mac's running Mavericks. I've not had a single issue with any of them.

Were you perhaps thinking about the Western Digital software that was losing people's data in conjunction with Mavericks instead?

Western Digital Warns External Hard Drive Customers Over Mavericks Data Loss

and

Western Digital Releases New Hard Drive Software After Mavericks Data Loss
Click to expand...

Thanks for your speedy response. Yes, I was thinking of that, I wasn't sure if the problem went beyond there.
 
nightlong said:
Thanks for your speedy response. Yes, I was thinking of that, I wasn't sure if the problem went beyond there.
Click to expand...

To the best of my knowledge, if you just let the OS (OS X or Windows) manage your HDD's there is no issue.

But if you are or were using the supplied Western Digital software to manage your HDD's on OS X, then there is/was an issue.
 
SandboxGeneral said:
I have several external HDD's hooked up to various Mac's running Mavericks. I've not had a single issue with any of them.

Were you perhaps thinking about the Western Digital software that was losing people's data in conjunction with Mavericks instead?

Western Digital Warns External Hard Drive Customers Over Mavericks Data Loss

and

Western Digital Releases New Hard Drive Software After Mavericks Data Loss
Click to expand...

This is the answer...The WD "Turbo" software was responsible for the data corruption on WD drives. FWIW, it isn't any better than the drivers that come with OSX, in fact it's slower. I have 2 WD 2TB drives and both have simply been formatted to HTFS and used without the WD junk ware. I had no data issues at all on upgrade.
 
Macman45 said:
This is the answer...The WD "Turbo" software was responsible for the data corruption on WD drives. FWIW, it isn't any better than the drivers that come with OSX, in fact it's slower. I have 2 WD 2TB drives and both have simply been formatted to HTFS and used without the WD junk ware. I had no data issues at all on upgrade.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I upgraded my Air today, and all seems well.
 
FYI I've been using SeaGate 640gb Free Agent with no new problems, I say this as occasionally the drive fails to mount but it did this under Lion too. The drive is 3 years old so i assume it's an intermittent hardware issue.
 
External Seagate and Mavericks

I am having problems when shutting down Mavericks with 2 external Seagate HD's as it just hangs on the grey screen. I can eject the drives and then it will shut down but it's a pain as both HD's are partitioned and have to select all to eject them everytime. As anyone had this problem and found a fix for this.
 
well i had my first issue this morning on my 2tb wd portable drive on my macbook pro i started in my bootcamp partition and it said it has a hfs+ driver issue so when i started back into windows it has wiped the drive and there was not wd smartware app
 
My iMac crashed last night, can't remember when it last did that, I'd left it to do this enormous 19gb time machine backup, which it seems it completed before it crashed, I was in another room doing something else, it was all frozen when I came back. MacBook Air did it's CC and time machine backups on a partitioned disk ... No problem with that.

Spelling police intervened, I'm pathological about misplaced apostrophes, lol, so for the record ... MacBook Air did ITS CC and time machine backups, etc.
 
Last edited:
WD sent out a email on 11/27 that their software issues had been fixed:
Dear WD Registered Customer,

As we previously announced, Western Digital received reports of Western Digital and other external HDD products experiencing data loss when updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9). Our investigation to date has found that for a small percentage of customers that have the WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager and/or WD SmartWare software applications installed on their Mac, there can be cases of a repartition and reformat of their Direct Attached Storage (DAS) devices without customer acknowledgement which can result in data loss. We have an updated version of the software that fixes this issue. We strongly recommend that you install this updated software. Please contact our service and support team with any questions.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=114&sid=62&lang=en

http://wdc.com/wdproducts/wdsmartwareupdate/wdsmartware.asp?id=wdfGeneric&os=mac
Sincerely,
Western Digital
 
There is still an issue with Mavericks itself. Drives are still being ejected for no reason. I'm still waiting for this to be resolved, numerous other threads on this in other forums...
 
I have three Macs--2013 Mini, 2009 Mac Pro & 2008 iMac--and all have external drives: La Cie, WD and OWC, including RAID. It's been 6 or 7 weeks of OS 10.9 and no corruption or data loss whatsoever. However I don't use aftermarket drive apps or drivers. The only issue I've seen is FW drives don't spin down when the computer sleeps. However if you switch then to USB they sleep fine.

I also work in an office with a lot of Mac users and nobody has had problems with their external drives and 10.9. I saw the Apple forum posts on external HD spontaneously reformatting but it seems to be a small sample of very unfortunate users.
 
How critical is it to reformat the WD drive? At this point, if you have used a 2TB or 3TB drive (with Firewire), but never used their smartware, is there still a concern that the original WD formatting will cause problems at some point? The Mavericks issue is apparently fixed, but some are suggesting our drives should have been manually reformatted from the start. True?
 
I had a 500gb WD external plugged into my rMBP while I was installing CS6 and suddenly the drive's desktop icon disappeared and reappeared as two partitions named "Mybook" and "EFI". I immediately ejected the drive and plugged it into my Desktop PC but unfortunately it got wiped clean and repartitioned for no apparent reason.

The only WD software I had was WDQuickView for my WD NAS... I'm currently Disk Drilling my drive hoping to get everything back.

btw is it possible to recover file/folder structures?
 
The issue I have with Mavericks and external (USB) drives, is that every time I plug one it, it wants to start indexing it, and while indexing, the whole computer slows to a crawl. CPU usage remains low, but the whole interface becomes extremely unresponsive.

Leaving a drive plugged in overnight doesn't help. The next time I plug it in again, same stupid indexing idiocy.

Perhaps I can add the drives to the Privacy setting which prevents indexing? Would Stupidlight still be able to find files by name in that case, or is a non-indexed location completely eliminated from any Stupidlight search - which would be irritating?
 
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