Chosen Solution
I successfully swapped out the original Seagate 1Tb drive in my 27" iMac for the above 3Tb drive (and a Samsung EVO 250Gb SSD) a week or so ago and everything went very smoothly. Unfortunately I’m now getting an issue where the internal 3Tb Seagate will randomly ’eject’ and I’m not able to mount it again without rebooting the machine from scratch. It seems to happen if a large ‘copy’ process is initiated - i was trying to automatically recover my iTunes library by bringing all my files back to the drive from iTunes Match using ‘Make Available Offline’…it gets so far and then stops/ejects :( For info the machine is i7 3.4Ghz, 1Gb ATI G’Fx and 32Gb @ 48Gb (upgraded from the original 16Gb @ 44Gb)after the drive swap) of Kingston 10600 1333MHz CL9. I’m not sure if the RAM as I didn’t get the error in the intervening week …but I also didn’t try the iTunes download then either ?? I’ve just updated the Seagate Firmware to the latest but the error recurred just after so this update hasn’t cured it.. Update Slightly Shameless Bump
I think I’ve answered my own question… I’ve temporarily put the original drive back into the machine and that works as it did before so logically that proves the SATA Cable isn’t broken or damaged? Then I’ve put the new unresponsive 3tb drive into a USB/SATA caddy and although your hear it ‘spin up’ it doesn’t ‘mount’ to the iMac desktop. In my mind that means for what ever reason the new drive has prematurely failed…I’ve checked all connections and fans etc and everything’s good so it’s not a thermal failure induced by something not cooking it even though the shell was quite hot when it first came out…
I would double check the systems firmware. Review this Apple T/N: About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers. Apple enabled SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) in the newer releases. The orginal firmware has SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) enabled which could explain why you are bombing moving a large number of files or a small group of very large files as the interface is mis-matched. The other possibly would be the SATA cable is bad.
