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Resolved 10.8.5 sleeps Thunderbolt drive

B

bryan85

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 18, 2010
243
3
Just upgraded to 10.8.5 and noticed the my WD Duo Thunderbolt drive will now go to sleep when not in use. Previously the drive would stay on all the time and never go to sleep. Is this a setting that I can change somewhere? I have already deselected the option under Energy Saver but, I don't think that applies to external drives.
 
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bryan85 said:
Just upgraded to 10.8.5 and noticed the my WD Duo Thunderbolt drive will now go to sleep when not in use. Previously the drive would stay on all the time and never go to sleep. Is this a setting that I can change somewhere? I have already deselected the option under Energy Saver but, I don't think that applies to external drives.
Click to expand...
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=17778810#post17778810

See also:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html
 
I noticed the same thing happen, except mine is a FW800 drive. I'm currently backing it up to the cloud with Backblaze and after updating noticed that it constantly spins down to sleep, then a few minutes later spins back up probably because Backblaze is accessing it to upload another file. But it just happens over and over, which I imagine can't be good for the drive. It didn't do this at all before, so 10.8.5 definitely changed something.
 
I am also having the same problem. I have four external drives and one fw800 RAID array. All drives are spinning down and spinning up constantly, and the noise is terrible. (Not to mention this cant be good for the power supplies or drives.)

I've since switched to running off of a lower power, linux based server and await any updates to fix this problem.
 
This bug was introduced with 10.8.5, it happens with TB, Firewire, and USB drives regardless of the disk setting in Energy Saver/pmset. The drives, at least for me, are put to sleep about 1 minute after the display goes to sleep and then wake up again once the display comes back on.

I've sent feedback to Apple via their feedback page, I suggest everyone with this problem do the same and make it visible.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
 
Yahooligan said:
This bug was introduced with 10.8.5, it happens with TB, Firewire, and USB drives regardless of the disk setting in Energy Saver/pmset. The drives, at least for me, are put to sleep about 1 minute after the display goes to sleep and then wake up again once the display comes back on.

I've sent feedback to Apple via their feedback page, I suggest everyone with this problem do the same and make it visible.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
Click to expand...

Also submitted bug report. Thanks for the link!
 
bryan85 said:
hrm... disksleep set to 0 already. :confused:
Click to expand...

I set disksleep to 60 and haven't noticed any spindowns/spinups since.

A.

Addendum: there was some spindown/spinup activity in the middle of the night.
 
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Yahooligan said:
This bug was introduced with 10.8.5, it happens with TB, Firewire, and USB drives regardless of the disk setting in Energy Saver/pmset. The drives, at least for me, are put to sleep about 1 minute after the display goes to sleep and then wake up again once the display comes back on.

I've sent feedback to Apple via their feedback page, I suggest everyone with this problem do the same and make it visible.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
Click to expand...

I am experiencing the same issue, but in addition, it appears to be spinning down all platter drives except the boot drive (I have a second internal drive that gets spun down as well as the external ones). I have computer sleep off, display sleep set to 13 minutes, and all four checkboxes unchecked in Energy Saver settings, and pmset confirms these settings. The drives spin down when the display goes to sleep, and come back up when accessed.

If I set display sleep to off, the hard drives follow that setting (hard drives do not spin down when the display does not sleep).

SMC reset, PRAM reset, and Safe Boot all result in no change to this behavior.

I have left feedback as well as contacting Apple Care to open a ticket there.
 
Just adding my name to the mix. 10.8.5 seems to be spinning internal platter drives for me even though my settings are to never sleep.

If it's quiet when I wake up the display, I can hear the drives spin up.

-Kevin
 
I installed "Keep Drive Spinning" and set it to 4 minutes since Western Digital external green drives put themselves to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity. Well, I just came upstairs from watching a movie via XBMC off a hacked AppleTV in another room that was accessing a movie from that 3TB USB3 external media drive and I came up maybe 3 minutes after the movie ended and watched as the drive went to sleep right before my eyes and then woke itself up a minute or two later again.

The point is that the Western Digital drives are set to 10 minutes internally, not 2-3 minutes. It's OSX that will often shut down a drive after only a couple of minutes of inactivity (certainly much faster than the firmware does anyway). This only started with the 10.8.5 update. I'm guessing that Apple somehow screwed up their own setting and even though I have it set in preferences to NOT put the drives to sleep, I think OSX is putting them to sleep whether or not it's checked since the update, perhaps even at irregular intervals. Something is definitely not right. Everything was working perfectly fine with 10.8.4.

The update also messed up some kind of setting in SMBUp (which puts Samba 3 on Mountain Lion since Apple's custom SMB setup does NOT work right with XBMC). However, re-installing SMBUp seems to have fixed that problem (so far it seems).

I have to give a big thumbs down to 10.8.5. I see no obvious improvements in day-to-day use, but they managed to damage drive sleep (and computer sleep as well for many by the sounds of it) and my networking setup. Way to go Apple! :mad:

Edit:

I tried a setting of 60 seconds for Keep Drive Spinning and the drive still went to sleep for 30 seconds or so just a minute ago and then spun back up. It seems the signal to make it sleep now is being sent REGARDLESS of disk activity (OR Keep Drive Spinning isn't working with 10.8.5). It's unbelievably annoying to have that drive spin down when you're using the computer.
 
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MagnusVonMagnum said:
I installed "Keep Drive Spinning"
Click to expand...

I don't think any type of "keep drive spinning" solution is a good answer for this. If you are experiencing this issue, the drive is still going to be put to sleep by the OS, and the app (or script) is just going to wake it right back up. This potentially results in more sleep/wake cycles than if you had just let it sleep and woke it up when you needed it.

Ideally, for the drive's health (IMO), we could just let it spin all the time and eliminate most of the start-up and shut-down cycles (like we could in 10.8.4 and prior).
 
It appears the latest OS X update has resolved this issue for me. The drive no longer goes to sleep. :D:cool:
 
Woot, same here. Now I don't have to manually eject my drive to prevent it from constantly spinning up and down when the display is asleep.
 
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