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External Drives Won't Sleep?

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guywhoisweird

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 9, 2010
33
3
After updating to Mavericks, none of my external drives will sleep. I have tried waiting while the system is live and putting the system to sleep - neither option spins them down.

This wasn't a problem on 10.8... just wondering if anyone else has had this problem and if they have a fix.

I am running Mavericks on a Late 2009 iMac. I have 2 WD My Book Studio IIs connected and daisy chained via Firewire 800. "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" is checked in Energy Saver.
 
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bytepl

macrumors newbie
Oct 24, 2013
1
0
Same here. I'm on a 2012 Mac Mini, my external Firewire drive won't sleep either.

Oh, and on Mountain Lion it took 1-2 secs to put the system to sleep mode. The same operation takes about 10 secs on Mavericks. Waiting for a fix.
 
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patH72

macrumors newbie
Oct 24, 2013
2
0
Same Issues

I have the same issues described above on my mid-2012 MacBook Pro with LaCie external drives. The drives will not go to sleep after inactivity. Also, it takes 30 seconds or so to sleep, when before Mavericks that would take only a few seconds.
 
D

dinkypumpkin

macrumors newbie
Oct 25, 2013
5
0
I encountered the same problem with my 2 MyBook Studio II drives (both RAID 1) connected via Firewire to mid-2010 MacBook Pro with Mavericks. I reconnected the drives via USB and now they generally spin down as normal. There are still occasions where they don't spin down when I put the machine to sleep, but a second attempt usually does the trick.
 
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WiLLGT09

WiLLGT09

macrumors regular
Nov 13, 2007
210
29
Interesting. I think I'm noticing this too, although I'm not certain as there's not sleep light on the MacBook Air (so I don't know if it's affecting my MBA's ability to enter Sleep mode). I simply >Sleep it and turn my ext. monitor off. However, I do recall not hearing the familiar spin-down sounds from my set of daisy-chained FW800 drives that I have connected to my Belkin Thunderbolt dock.
 
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dzdrop

macrumors newbie
Oct 26, 2013
1
0
Can confirm it's a FW issue

Got three WD drives connected to my iMac, two by FW, one on USB. The USB drive sleeps when the iMac does, the two FW drives stay awake.
Swapped out the FW cable for a USB cable on one of the FW drives - and now it DOES sleep.

So, yep, external drives connected by FW won't sleep on Mac OS X Mavericks.
 
C

chuckm1020

macrumors regular
Aug 27, 2009
149
28
Same issue here. My USB 3.0 drive sleeps. But I have a thunderbolt to firewire HD setup hooked up to my retina that won't sleep.
 
L

LCD

macrumors member
Dec 28, 2012
81
1
USA
Firewire drives don't eject in 10.9

One of my external hard drives can be connected with USB 2 as well and it still ejects properly when I use it in Mavericks. But after upgrading from Mountain Lion, when I use the Firewire port in a late 2012 Mini and try to eject either of my OWC Mercury Elite drives from the Finder or Disk Utility, their icons disappear from the desktop but they continue to spin. All partitions in both drives are listed in Spotlight Privacy.

[Mod note: Merged into existing thread]
 
Last edited by a moderator:
jazz1

jazz1

Contributor
Aug 19, 2002
4,499
18,210
Mid-West USA
dzdrop said:
Got three WD drives connected to my iMac, two by FW, one on USB. The USB drive sleeps when the iMac does, the two FW drives stay awake.
Swapped out the FW cable for a USB cable on one of the FW drives - and now it DOES sleep.

So, yep, external drives connected by FW won't sleep on Mac OS X Mavericks.
Click to expand...

Same here, got pointed to this thread because I mentioned it in another thread. USB is not really an option for me as I have three external drives, and I can't daisy chain USB. I am using the Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 Apple adapter.

I guess it is time to finally go with a Thunderbolt Drobo and stop messing around with multiple Firewire drives. But geez I've got a lot of money tied up in the external drives.
 
Nermal

Nermal

Moderator
Staff member
Dec 7, 2002
20,664
4,086
New Zealand
I have a cheap "XCraft" FW800 drive and it still sleeps properly, just like it used to. I did a clean install of 10.9 and don't have any third-party drive software installed.

System is an Early 2011 MBP.
 
gr8tfly

gr8tfly

macrumors 603
Oct 29, 2006
5,333
99
~119W 34N
This is ironic considering they just fixed a problem that kept sleeping external hard drives with 10.8.5. All was bright in the FW800 universe until 10.9.

Needless to say, I'm seeing the same behavior on my FW800 chain of 6 drives. I normally have the "sleep hard drives when possible" unchecked, but even testing with it enabled, they don't sleep.

Off to the OS X Feedback site...

Just as an aside, I will say I haven't had any problems at all with Mavericks, aside from a couple of UI nits (grayed Finder list view columns, lighter background in Safari Reader, and I'm personally missing the Time Machine status animation). Speed and smoothness improvements are very noticeable. I would describe scrolling as "buttery smooth". Also, an extra hour of estimated battery life on mid-2012 15" rMBP ain't bad either (from an estimated 6.5 to 7, to what looks to be an easy 8 hours).
 
Gochugogi

Gochugogi

macrumors regular
Oct 27, 2013
223
26
Sandwich Isles
OS 10.9 won't let my external Firewire drives spin down too, :( although HD spin down is selected in Energy Saver. My Mini (2013 vintage) sleeps fine but drives connected to its FW port spin all night. I now turn them off before going to bed. They were fine under OS 10.8.3. The FW sleep issue is the only real bug I've experienced under OS 10.9 after 5 days of use.
 
steve-p

steve-p

macrumors 68000
Oct 14, 2008
1,740
42
Newbury, UK
I've noticed this too with a FireWire connected drive. Previously, ejecting the drive in Finder would cause the external drive to spin down immediately. Now it just carries on running indefinitely until I turn the power to the drive off.
 
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