Why would re-formatting an external disk drive stop random drive disconnects in OSX Mavericks?

My old MacBook Pro Retina was over heating, so after a long story omitted, I got a new MBP Retina with Mavericks pre-installed, and my Seagate Thunderbolt(TB)/USB3 drive started unmounting and unmounting without syncing the filesystems at random on me - it didn’t matter which interface I used, TB or USB3. It would happen sporadically - like once every N-hours, for small N in {1,2,3,4}.

I contacted Seagate customer support, and Seagate pointed me to a Apple discussion where someone with a Western Digital drive experienced a similar thing, and reformatting the drive solved their problem. So, wanting to comply with Seagate's customer support, which has been great as an aside, I did as they suggested...

Juggling 2TBytes of data off a backup drive, especially when a lot of that data is in Apple proprietary format (and tools like Carbon Copy Cloner fearlessly - or is that fearfully? - give up on cloning the same) is a pain. Here’s an ironic twist - I picked up another Seagate drive from Costco - about the same model - and when I get it home, and try to copy my backup drive to this one - the new one doesn’t mount! Its power supply is BAD! I have to use my own USB3 power supply to use the “loner” drive from Costco to juggle the 2TBytes of data off of my backup drive.

So, I got that done, yesterday, reformatted my drive, and copied it all back and verified - like 6 hours for one leg of each transfer/verify cycle! (And now, I can take back the drive to Costco and legitimately say, IT DON’T WORK. :-D I can also tell them, it is the power supply that doesn’t work - the drive is fine. :-D)

It's been about 16-hours, now, and no random drive disconnects. I have my fingers crossed. If this works, there was some bad advice given about just sending the drive back that I read on one of the discussions. Anyway, that leads me to my question:

Why would re-formatting an external disk drive stop random drive disconnects in OSX Mavericks? I mean, wasn't the first format good enough? This is digital, not analog, so what bit changed and why?

The thing that gets me is that I had to use "asr" (Apple Software Restore - backend for Disk Utility's restore functionality), after re-partitioning and re-formatting the drive, and that utility uses a block-copy method - shouldn't any problems be propagated along to the new drive and back to the questionable one with the block-copying? Alas, that is a second question....

[Update: It's now been over 24-hours and no random disconnects. I'm almost ready to write a letter back to the Seagate support person suggesting that this fixed the problem, but I'm not ready to go that far...yet.]

[Update: It's now been about a week and no random disconnects. I'm sending an e-mail to Seagate to inform them of the success, and to ask why this procedure has resolved the issue.]

[Update: According to Seagate:

I am very glad to hear that you found a resolution. Unfortunately, I am not sure why reformatting the drive would help. It is quite strange that this solved the issue.

Certain issues can be resolved with formatting modern hard drives, though this wouldn't have been a circumstance I would have imagined formatting would help. I will pass this information on and if there is anything that we are able to on our side, rest assured that we will.

Seagate's original suggestion

I found a possible solution to this from the Apple Support Community. Please see the link below for details:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23541074#23541074

So, closing this issue. If Seagate knows why, then they could be the responsible party. Classic case of two organizations working closely with each other - NOT! Apple and Seagate. LOL.

BTW - These drives will not boot off the Thunderbolt interface whereas they can over the USB 3.0 interface, and neither Apple nor Seagate will lay claim to that one as well. Ahhh... My next pressing question. But for another time.... ]