Firewire removable drive eject problem

Hi
I have one of those intermittent failures which is driving me crazy. I've got a Granite Digital removable FW-800 drive hooked up to my Quad (10.4.7). Also have a SATA removable drive bay. Most of the time, external drives work just great, and there's no problem.
However... often enough to make me ask it here, I'll eject the drive, via drag to the trash in the dock, or via contextual menu "eject" and, after a bit longer pause than usual, the icon will disappear from the finder's desktop. Everything looks good, but...
... when I go to turn off the drive, or remove it, I get an "improperly put away...may damage drive" message.
And then... it's totally impossible to restart or shut down the machine. A power off is needed.
Leaving aside comments on how long the software should be looking for an obviously missing drive before simply giving up (hint: infinity is too long) there's this.
What's happening? (don't say that something is open on the drive... nothing is) and two, is there something I can do once I get this message to prevent the infinite look? Terminal command? Anything?
OK: one more thing - am I the only person this happens to?
TIA
Tracy
ex-programmer and Mac user since 1984...

Gleaned from a string of several painful experiences...
When "OFF" isn't really "off."
When it's a switch on the back of some, and certainly firewire boxes fall into the "some" category, peripheral boxes. I spent I don't know how many hours chasing this down because I forgot something I'd learned a few years ago: it's OK to switch off the power to an external firewire box using the switch on the back of the box, but it's NOT OK to switch it off by turning off (unplugging) the "brick" or using a master controller that turns off the AC power.
Why? Because "off" isn't really "off"... keeping the "brick" alive keeps the system informed about the firewire device's presence; turn it off "at the wall" and you're going to seriously confuse the system. In my system, it would work this way: if I left the box switch in the "on" position, then when I turned on the wall power, the hard drive would show up on my desktop.
Now, I was always religious about ejecting the drive before I powered down, but my mistake was powering down "at the wall" instead of using the switch on the back of the box. I figured I'd save the power drained by the brick when I wasn't using the drive.
Bad mistake. About 50% of the time, when I'd eject the -next- drive I mounted externally, I'd get a message saying "improper device removal"... and my system would -seriously- choak up. Nothing would run; nothing would quit and I'd be faced with a forced hard power-off of my whole system.
Once I recalled what the heck I was doing wrong, and reverted to "once powered on, leave it on" the problems went away.
The problem seems to affect external SATA drives as well (although I'm not as positive of that as I am of the firewire issue.) So: leave the boxes plugged into the wall, and only use the switches on the back to turn them on and off. If the wall-wart bricks are eating up extra power, I'm afraid that's the price you pay for the modern age.
hth
Tracy

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