Screensaver freezing

[nearfantastica]

My parents just got a new Mac Mini and are having problems with the screensaver. I set it all up for them and have it set for "flurry" to start after 10 minutes. I have to computer set to never sleep (they do it manually at night) and the display to sleep after 20 minutes.

So what's happening is that the screensaver comes on and is normal but at some point the picture freezes. In order to get back to the desktop, you have to click the mouse, you can't just move it like you usually would to stop the screensaver.

Does anyone else have this problem or know if there is something we have set up wrong?

 

[applesanity]

I am encountering the same issue. My screensaver is set to "sliding panels" pulling from a custom photo folder. What I have noticed is that it appears to always stop on the same images. Now that could just be a coincidence with timing as those are images typically displayed first in the series and I don't have it set to random. So it could just be freezing on the second or third run through.
I plan to record how long it takes till it freezes when I get back to my mac mini.

 

[gsilver]

This has been happening to me for a while. I use the "Shell" screensaver and I'll frequently come back to find my Macbook Pro locked up.

I've discovered what I think is the cause for this, although I don't know what the solution is. Yesterday, after waking my macbook up from the screensaver I received a system notification telling me that my hard drive was running low on space. I checked and I had 80MB of space left when there should have been 30GB at least.

After rebooting I had all of my space back. I just left my screensaver running for 40 minutes and noticed that my available HD space dropped from 47GB to 22GB while the screensaver was running. I'm guessing the freezing occurs when the HD becomes completely full.

I'm running a Samsung 256GB 830 SSD. I get the same results whether TRIM is on or off.

 

[gsilver]

I was hoping 10.8.3 would fix this but it's still happening. I started my screensaver before lunch and when I came back my disk space had decreased from 47GB to 18GB. It's slowly increasing now that I'm logged in (up to 25GB now after 3 minutes or so)

Can anyone else confirm this behavior?

 

[gizmoking]

maybe it has to do with SSD?

I just upgraded to a mac mini and added a fusion drive, and I am experiencing the same thing. I never had this problem on my macbook pro (didn't have SSD on there either). Can everyone having this problem confirm they have an SSD? or some sort of fusion setup?

 

[applesanity]

I can confirm that I have setup fusion drive on my late 2012 mac mini using a Samsung 840 250GB SSD.

 

[gsilver]

I'm not using a Fusion drive at all, just a Samsung SSD 830. I took my MBP to the Genius Bar and they booted it from the network and started running some sort of Apple diagnostic program. The diagnostic test failed on the Hard Drive portion almost immediately.

I'm not having any other issues and after plugging the SSD into a Windows machine and running the Samsung Magician software there were no S.M.A.R.T warnings.

Also, on my MBP this only happens with the "Shell" screensaver. I can run any of the other ones without issue. I've just switched to a different screensaver and everything works now, but I don't like the fact that there is still an issue that hasn't been resolved. I've considered RMA'ing my SSD as well, but I'm not convinced there is something wrong with it.

 

[gsilver]

I completed some further testing on this issue this weekend and here are the results.

1.)Replaced RAM. Same lock-ups.

2.)Reinstalled Mountain Lion. Shell screensaver still freezes.

3.)Replaced Samsung SSD with a Crucial SSD. Booted to Internet recovery and install Lion. Shell screensaver does not eat hard drive space resulting in a hard lock-up of my MBP. Everything is good at this point.

4.)Updated to Mountain Lion via the App Store. Shell screensaver now locks-up my MBP.

5.)Swapped out the Crucial SSD with the original Samsung SSD and I repeated steps 3-4. Same behavior. Shell screensaver will eventually consume all available disk space and lock-up my MBP.

It appears to be an issue with Mountain Lion. I'm wondering if this might be an issue with AMD GPU drivers (I have an Early 2011 model with the 1GB 6750m.) Hopefully Mavericks will fix this.

 

[gsilver]

I was able to make this stop happening by downloading gfxCardStatus and setting the GPU to "Discrete Only". As long as my 6750m is being used the Shell screen saver doesn't lock up. When I set my MBP to use the integrated (Intel HD 3000) GPU the hard drive space slowly disappears (about 2GB per 30 minutes) and eventually locks up the computer.

 

[pentool]

I'm encountering the same issue on my Mac mini (late 2012).

1. Screen saver runs after 5 minutes (doesn't matter which one).
2. Screen goes to sleep after 15 minutes.
3. Wake up monitor -> Mac freezes.

When I bought the mini in May (2013) I believe it came with 10.8.2 (or 10.8.3, can't remember). In those times the screen saver just froze while it was running. But I was still able to stop it by just moving the mouse.

As I was upgrading to 10.8.4 and now 10.8.5 the symptoms are worse. Now the screensaver doesn't freeze while it is running, and the monitor goes to sleep fine, but now the Mac just freezes (almost) every time after I wake up the monitor.

I have an ADATA S510 120G SSD as the boot drive (not using fusion). First I thought it's the drive. But the hardware test came out OK. No issues with the drive or the RAM (8G).

Just a day ago I figured out, if I turn off the screensaver and only use the monitor to go to sleep, then I don't have freezes. It's gotta be some system issue since the symptoms were changing (getting worse) from 10.8.2 to 10.8.5.

I have reset the NVRAM (PRAM); reinstalled the system (and didn't install any software after that for testing); reset the SMC. None helped. So I'm just running without screensaver.


Mac mini (late 2012)
OS X 10.8.5
ADATA S510 120G SSD (not using fusion drive)
Samsung S27B970D monitor via DisplayPort cable