pmset and Safe Sleep, can't disable it

Take a look at the discussion here. There are a couple of posts (like this) explaining the procedure:

Go to Terminal and enter: sudo pmset -a autopoweroff 0

To undo type: sudo pmset -a autopoweroff 1

Hope this helps...

It's a Process ID (PID). 10.8 has a different sleep management compared to previous OS X. Programms have to actively block sleep now. You can check PIDs for example in activity monitor.

I have the same issue. I have reset the autopoweroff and hibernatemode to 0. I still get the **** safe sleep. Strange thing is it only happens when it is plugged in. It noticed this started to happen after I updated the OS (forgot which version). If anyone have a solution, please share.

I think this solution makes perfect sense. Just sharing...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4506347?answerId=21325631022#21325631022

This thread may be a little stale, but it fits my issue perfectly.

Has anyone discovered a usable workaround to prevent iMac's from going into Safe Sleep yet?

The recommendations in this thread haven't produced any results for me.

One of the major benefits (at the time) that caused me to switch to Apple workstations was their ability to recover from sleep almost instantly. This is a significant problem for me.

I have a late 2012 Mac Mini base model (refurbished, running OS X 10.8.4), that I added 16GB of RAM and a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD to (in the primary drive slot, moving the stock HDD to the secondary slot). I had trouble getting wake on lan to work (through my DD-WRT router), when the machine was in "deep sleep" (where the light was completely off), which I later came to learn is called "safe sleep." When it was in normal sleep (light slowly oscillating) then WOL worked fine.

In my case, I had already set hibernatemode=0 and autopoweroff=0 via pmset, but it was still happening. Finally I set standby=0 and that did the trick (stopped going into safe sleep). This is in spite of the fact that according to the man page, this should not be needed; standby is supposed to be ignored if hibernatemode=0, which was definitely not the behavior I observe on my machine.

Anyway, I'm just posting this in case it helps anyone else in a similar situation. Set standby=0 via pmset and see if that lets you disable safe sleep.

Correction to the above, WOL still does not work. 😟 The light doesn't go completely off, but even still, after a certain period of time, the wake on lan packet no longer wakes the machine up. It still works if the machine has "just" gone to sleep. Very frustrating, guess I have to simply disable sleep when going out of town.

Hello everybody, I see this thread is quite old, did someone figured out how exactly pmset works?

Why even when hibernatemode is 0 iMac still tends to create sleepimage file and after standbydelay time hibernates?

When exactly is sleepimage file created? It looks like the system doesn't even have to go into sleep for the sleepimage file to be created.

My problem is now when all the pmset is restored to defaults, after standbydelay it falls probably into Safe Sleep (hibernates to sleepimage) and then it's "hard to wake it up". After first click on the mouse or keyboard I see power consumption rise and disk spin-up could be heard, screen backlit comes up but screen remains dark. It takes few more clicks to bring up logon screen and get system up and running.

I don't know if the system is trying to wake up from sleepimage, but as it is an iMac, connected to AC all the time I think it should wake up from RAM, not from the file stored on disk.

Also I were still not able to figure out the difference with standby and autopoweroff.

So to avoid all those troubles I have just set standby and autopoweroff to 0 and that sorted the problem out for now. But I would be very happy to know exactly what's going on here. If anyone have clear explanation it would be very appreciated. But unfortunately looks like even the Apple doesn't have because it's not even explained correctly in man documentation with the latest version of macOS.

Thanks in advance, regards...

Manolis