External Drives Won't Sleep?

[d0nK]

Have this problem with my late 2011 15" mbp SSD + internal HD.

Since installing Mavericks, my internal HD won't sleep; it's constantly spinning!!

Is there any fix to this?
Any news of this being fixed by Apple in an update?
Are Apple just going to ignore this like they do with so many of their unwanted "features".... like the hit power button to sleep change and a raft of other crap

 

[Gochugogi]

I am assuming this won't be fixed as most if not all new Macs don't have FW800 ports? So for older machines, it might be better to roll back to 10.8?

Actually all Mini models and the least expensive MacBook Pro still have FW800. I bought a Mini just for FW so I can keep using my MOTU Ultralite audio interface.

 

[blodyholy]

Bumping this up again as someone mentioned in the 10.9.2 release thread (link below) that external FW drives are now properly sleeping when possible with this release. I have a LaCie 2 big RAID connected via FW 800, which I tested last night, and appears to still not sleep. (Put disks to sleep when possible is checked in sys prefs).
Has anyone else tested their drive to see if its fixed?

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=18815715&firewire#post18815715

Thanks!

 

[Tulani]

I am still to update. Hoping someone else will confirm.

 

[Siderz]

THEY FIXED IT. I AM SO ****ING HAPPY!!!! THANK THE LORD IT'S FINALLY FIXED!!!

When I was updating I was thinking "This isn't going to fix the FW800 problem though isn't it..." but damn it just worked when I ejected my hard drive!

 

[Tulani]

Ouch is that a cynical feedback?

 

[PicnicTutorials]

My OWC drive sleeps. In pref under energy pref click put external drive to sleep whenever possible. But I think this has to do with the drive model itself is why some have issues and others don't.

 

[ssls6]

From my own testing.

1) FW800 will sleep if ejected
2) FW800 will sleep if mac sleeps
3) FW800 will not sleep if mounted but inactive (some say this is working but not for me)
4) FW800 will not sleep if ejected but spun up by waking the mac or if finder spins up the drive for certain disk activities. I can remount and eject again to make them sleep

So for my drives, 10.9.2 is an improvement but not a complete fix.

 

[blodyholy]

#4 is my specific issue - Although I have not tried #2. Drive would sleep under 10.8 after ~15 minutes of inactivity. Although not a deal breaker, ejecting the drive is counterproductive as I use mine on an always-on media server.

From my own testing.

1) FW800 will sleep if ejected
2) FW800 will sleep if mac sleeps
3) FW800 will not sleep if mounted but inactive (some say this is working but not for me)
4) FW800 will not sleep if ejected but spun up by waking the mac or if finder spins up the drive for certain disk activities. I can remount and eject again to make them sleep

So for my drives, 10.9.2 is an improvement but not a complete fix.

 

[Gochugogi]

So far 10.92 has been seamless, fast and glitch free. In other words nuttin' happened (unlike 10.91 which nearly hosed my Mini i7). But the biggie is my OWC FW800 drive will now sleep and coexists perfectly with USB3.

 

[adonishong]

I have made some mistake by myself, thunderbolt does not help in this issue

 

[EDWW]

Since upgrading to 10.9.2 I've tried (one at a time) an OWC FW800, a Voyager Q Hard Drive Dock and a Lacie Drive. As was the case previously none of the drives will spin down when the computer sleeps.

When I tried ejecting each the drives they would spin down only to awake later on yet not be visible on the desktop. So there is absolutely no improvement for me and I will have to continue using USB. The computer is a 27" mid 2010 2.93 Ghz i7 iMac.

 

[Tulani]

External Drives Won't Sleep?

Two days after 10 9 2 upgrade & my little LaCie big thunderbolt disk has been snugly going to sleep as expected. Happy customer here........latest 27 inch iMac

 

[Gochugogi]

I mentioned a few posts back my OWC FW drive now spins down under 10.92 and, indeed, it does whenever I invoke sleep or the Energy Saver kicks in after 10 minutes. My two LaCie drive spin down also. However there is a remaining glitch: I have the "Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible" checked and, well, apparently it's no longer possible! So the FW drives spin all the time while I'm working and only sleep when the system sleeps. Finally, if I plug any of these disks into my Belkin FW hub, they won't spin down no matter what. Of course they spin down perfectly under 10.8.5, even with the hub or "Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible" checked. Think I'll have to slink back to USB 2 and just leave my MOTU Ultralite (audio interface) on FW.

 

[PliSsK]

Yeah, my FW800 drive can now be ejected properly. About time. I wasn't expecting them to fix it ever. However, the damage has been done arguably (and lots of time wasted).

 

[icrude]

I found the issue at least for my scenario! I noticed I had 4 drives daisy chained up to my thunderbolt monitor. 3 of them would sleep but the 4th never would. I would also get eject error messages all the time. I have to plug each drive into the wall, but I thought maybe the one cable running to the display isn't enough to control all these drives. I hooked the drive that wouldn't sleep right up to my laptop and left the other drives hooked up to the monitor, and bam, it sleeps, and never improperly ejects. Wonderful.

 

[Bregalad]

To hear that everyone is now switching to USB for reliability is scary to me. For years I had problems with external USB drives reporting corruption when my Mac woke from sleep. I lost the contents of four USB devices before deciding to bite the bullet and replace everything with FW800. Luckily all were backup copies. Admittedly that was in the Leopard/Snow Leopard days, but once bitten twice shy.

This current problem appears to be merely an annoying waste of electricity, but it's still a bug in a formerly solid area and makes me nervous. I'm glad I'm still running Mountain Lion at home where i've got a lot of external HDs.

 

[mzd]

So far 10.92 has been seamless, fast and glitch free. In other words nuttin' happened (unlike 10.91 which nearly hosed my Mini i7). But the biggie is my OWC FW800 drive will now sleep and coexists perfectly with USB3.

Did you do anything other than update to 10.9.2? I just checked and my OWC drive is still not sleeping with FW800.
I have been using USB2 with that drive since installing Mavericks.
My old Maxtor FW400 drive sleeps just fine btw.

 

[Gochugogi]

Nope, plain old 10.92. Anywho, my Macs run all day so the FW drives would burn up since they don't sleep when inactive but only during system sleep or ejection. So I went back to USB 2 and will gradually transition to USB3. Beginning to think Apple has no plans to fix the FW glitch as this is 7 months out from the Mavericks release.

 

[nyroger]

Lacie won't sleep

I have this same problem and have concerns regarding longevity of HD. Use 2012 iMac running 10.9.2 w/Lacie and Seagate external HDs, both connected by USB. The Lacie HD doesn't sleep all the time. Found that Time Machine backup was causing some of the problem. Downloaded Time Machine Scheduler and set schedule to 12 hours and to not backup between 8pm and 8am. This seems to help the problem, but not completely. Seagate HD has no problem sleeping. Have not reported problem to Apple, but will do so now.

 

[Oujmik]

I've still got this problem too. BUS powered OWC SSD on FW800 (yes I know the FW is a bottleneck but it's on a 2009 mini so better than USB2.0).

It doesn't even turn off when the machine turns off. If you just plug it in with the machine off the SSD will turn on and stay on (luckily it has a hard switch). With USB it behaves normally.

 

[spidey3]

I have to say, I really wish I had found this thread BEFORE I went through the massive effort of hacking around to install Mavericks on my MacPro1,1.

Even 10.9.4 refuses to allow my several Firewire 800 drives to sleep (event though the SpindownHD tool indicates that they are in "sleep" mode).

Note this machine never sleeps - it acts as a server, and several other machines depend on it. I am, nevertheless, hoping that the external drives can be made to sleep when they are not being accessed...

Spidey!

 

[Gochugogi]

Updated to OS 10.95 and finally got around to checking if my old FW drives will spin down when "Put hard drives to sleep when possible" is checked in Energy Saver. Sorry to report the same old: they don't spin down. My USB2/3 drives spin down just fine. The FW drives will spin down only if manually ejected. Otherwise they'll spin until meltdown.

It's been a year since Mavericks debuted so it doesn't look like Apple has plans to remedy the FW sleep issue.

 

[grantfoto]

Did anyone find a solution other than switching to USB from Firewire? I'm on El Capitan (10.11) now and my iomega 1TB drives continue to spin after the computer itself sleeps. Annoying.

 

[gvmelbrty]

Did anyone find a solution other than switching to USB from Firewire? I'm on El Capitan (10.11) now and my iomega 1TB drives continue to spin after the computer itself sleeps. Annoying.

I’ve tried seemingly every solution to this problem that has been posted on the Internet, including switching to USB instead of Firewire - even that didn’t work - drives would still not sleep using USB!

Finally, after months of experimenting with various options, I found something that actually works using a utility called SleepWatcher. Go to this Apple forum discussion, scroll down a bit and look for a post by “Király” dated Mar 12, 2014 2:31 PM: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5486167?start=135&tstart=0 .. You’ll have to use Terminal commands to set it up, but it works.

I have not yet upgraded to El Capitan, but I’m pretty sure you’ll need to disable the new System Integrity Protection (rootless) feature of El Capitan in order to install SleepWatcher. I’d rather not disable this security feature, but it’s been nice having sleeping Firewire drives again, so I’ll do it if I have to. .. How to Disable System Integrity Protection (rootless) in OS X El Capitan