El Capitan has brought back a problem that I had with Yosemite at first - it disappeared after a later OS update.
I have a headless MacMini on my home network, with a daisy chain of firewire disks attached to it. I use them for backing up photographs and movies (~3TB worth), and the MacMini runs CCC to keep all disks synced. The two disks I use most often have aliases in my dock so I can access them easily.
After the 10.11 upgrade they keep mounting spontaneously on my desktop.
They are not among my login items. I have cleared the Recent Items from the Apple menu, and have cleared Recent Servers from the Finder/Go/Connect to Server... menu. Directory Utility shows no mounts. I have disabled the Guest account as I had read it can cause unwanted connections.
The one clue I have is that I can dismount the two disks, but they will remount on opening some apps like Preview or TextEdit - perhaps something to do with their open dialog looking for files to open? I have no files on either disk that they have ever opened or saved to those disks.
Using Main Menu Pro I have cleaned the system cache, all user caches, font cache, DNS cache and all logs. I'd do it all again with Onyx, but it hasn't been updated for 10.11 yet. The disks still keep mounting!
BTW, today I updated another mac at home and it has started automounting just one of those two disks - the only one of the two that it has ever mounted. I'm missing something - any ideas what it might be?