10.8.5 puts drives to sleep... forever

I am also having the same issue. 2 External USB3 drives, one Thunderbolt Drive, and one four bay RAID array over fw800. All of which sleep every 5 minutes, followed by spinning the drives up again. My Mac Server is not usable because disk access is interrupted each time the drives spin down. To prevent drive failure, I've turned off my system and am using a backup (lower speed) LInux based server in the meantime.

I've tried toggling the drive sleep option in power management, tried using pmset, even tried creating a cronjob that touches a file on each of my externals ever 30 seconds. All of which fail to stop the drives from sleeping.

This is a very serious bug possibly resulting in early hardware failure and I am very surprised it passed QA.

This issue did *not* exist in 10.8.4.

I wrote a script which writes to a file on each hard drive every 30 seconds and it has stopped the drives from constantly sleeping...

I'll repost it here:

I've got a workaround involving a shell script, so you need to be able to use Terminal.app and unix shell.

Here it is:

#!/bin/bash

while true

do

date > /Volumes/NameOfHardDrive1/wakey

date > /Volumes/NameOfHardDrive2/wakey

date > /Volumes/NameOfHardDrive3/wakey

date > /Volumes/NameOfHardDrive4/wakey

/bin/sleep 30

done

That script is an example of the one I use, with the names of my volumes changed to generic names, which you should change to the ones you have. I call it funny enough 'wakey' as in wakey wakey sleepy head 🙂

if you leave the script in your home directory, then you can invoke it from Terminal by typing /bin/bash ~/wakey (or whatever you call it)

I've got a similar problem with 10.8.5 in that my external WD Media drive keeps going to sleep. It used to go to sleep by its own firmware with 10 minutes of inactivity. Now it goes to sleep whenever the heck it feels like it (e.g. I'll watch a movie from an AppleTV off that drive in another room and by the time I walk into this room from downstairs, a minute or two, the darn drive has gone to sleep already!!!) But it doesn't go to sleep if I wake it up from the computer right away. No, it's behaving in some kind of very very ODD manner now. It's like while you're using the drive like watching a movie from it, the computer is waiting for you to stop accessing it and IMMEDIATELY shuts the drive down the moment you stop accessing it. I've looked at photos from XBMC and paused it on a photo for like one minute and move on to the next and there's that 20 second delay before the next photo comes up which tells me the darn drive is spinning back up in the other room even though it's only been a minute at most. OSX just plain IGNORES the "Put Drives to Sleep" setting and does whatever the heck it feels like.

I've tried using "Keep Drive Spinning" but it does NOT work consistently. Even if I set it to access the drive every 60 seconds, sooner or later the drive spins down and 20-30 seconds later it spins right back up again. It's like it IGNORES the access to the drive as part of the "timer" that determines when it can turn the drive off and instead it waits x minutes as if you weren NOT using the drive and then holds the command to make it sleep in a buffer and the second you stop using the drive for a moment, even, it tells it to go to sleep (even if Keep Drive Spinning tells it to wake back up again 20 seconds later!). It's buggered. In fact, it just went to sleep again right as I'm typing this and it hasn't been 5 minutes since it last woke up. It's CLEARLY OSX telling it to shut down because the firmware on this drive is VERY VERY consistent with a 10 minute inactivity timer in its firmware. I believe Keep Drive Spinning would work fine with that timer, but it CANNOT override OSX sending the "sleep" command to the drive whenver the heck it feels like sending it!

This has to be by FAR the most annoying bug I've ever encountered in an OSX "update". If I had ANY inkling this was going to happen, I NEVER would have updated from 10.8.4 which worked perfectly fine. In fact, I've noticed not one obvious improvement in day-to-day use in the update, but I have noticed my external drive constantly and I mean CONSTANTLY going to sleep for no apparent reason. The darn thing takes a good 15-20 seconds to spin back up. That's just horrible when you're trying to use the darn computer and Finder gives the freaking beach ball all the time. How much do you want to bet that Apple doesn't fix this problem in any kind of timely manner either? They seem to be getting worse and worse about missing blatant bug problems in updates and then taking forever to fix them again, IMO. Frankly, I wonder if 10.9 will even have a fix since they will probably NOT acknowledge there's even a problem to begin with! It's like not allowing trim support on 3rd party drives. They will impy you should have bought an Apple drive if you don't want issues.....(sigh)

Using Terminal, what is your disksleep period?

Type pmset -g with a return in Terminal.

What does it say across from disksleep? If you haven't checked the box to put disks to sleep when possible, your disksleep should be zero (disabled).

I'm wondering if this is a bug of the OS or a bug of the user-interface of the OS (in Energy Saver).

Also does this bug affect your internal boot drive (connected via the built-in SATA interface)?

I'm kind of bummed. Before going to bed last night I updated the OS a 2008 aluminum MacBook that is used as my house media server. Several terabytes of USB storage are connected to the drive and I didn't get a chance to test anything after the update. I'm now at work and won't be able to see I'm affected by this until late in the afternoon.

My disksleep is 0.

I have all internal drives and no external. Also, my boot drive is an SSD and I am still hit by this issue.

It appears, at least for me, to only be triggered by the display going to sleep. I set my display to not sleep and I haven't had the problem since. If I go back and change the setting to have the display sleep, the problem returns.

Thanks. Bummer. I guess I'll be reinstalling 10.8.4 tonight on my home server.

FYI - I have two mid-2011 MacBook Airs with the Apple-supplied SSD. This bug doesn't affect those computers.

I wonder if the fact that I have an aftermarket SSD is somehow related.

Seems likely. I'm also curious about whether this bug affects a spinning drive that was the original Apple-supplied drive in that computer.

More Information: Last night I used the combo 10.8.5 updater to update a 2008 MacBook from 10.8.4 to 10.8.5. I never use the Apple Store update process or the incremental updater that can be downloaded. When I left that computer, it had 3 external USB drives mounted (with a powered hub) as well as the internal boot drive. All of the USB drives were in OWC enclosures. The boot drive is a regular spinning drive that didn't come with the computer. The display on that computer sleeps after 10 minutes and the whole computer sleeps after an hour but I have it set for "old-fashioned" RAM sleep (sleepmode 0) where the contents of RAM are not written to the boot drive. It wakes up faster that way and makes it better as a media server.

Also, the Energy Saver setting for this computer is to spin down drives when possible.

This afternoon I finally got to check out this computer after reading about this bug. Everything is fine. All mounted drives are still mounted and available when the computer wakes up.

Two things to note: I used the combo updater to do my Mac OS X update and this computer uses sleepmode 0 instead of the default sleepmode 3. That may or may not help. It never hurts to re-apply the combo updater over an already updated system.

You can get the combo updater from: <http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1676>

My problem is similar and started with the 10.8.5 update but:

The disk in slot one is my boot drive. I have the disks in slot 2 and 3 partitioned into a raid 0 and a raid 1. I have a disk in the fourth slot, and another disk shoved into the unused DVD drive bay (a hack).

It seems all the disks except the boot drive will spin down, but they do not unmount. Not a party killer, but annoying.

10.8.5 (12f37)

early 2008 Mac Pro 2x2.8Ghz quad-core Xeon

10 GB 667 Mhz DDR2

This issue is actually getting worse for me. Not only do the drives spin down, one of them keeps dropping off because of errors and has to be physically replugged in for the computer to see it again. I had none of these problems before the upgrade to 10.8.5.

Drive sleep by itself will not kill a drive, but if you continually turn off and back on (or spin up and down) a drive rapidly, as it appears this bug is doing, you could trigger premature failure of the drive.

Again, this is why I've turned off my home server until a fix is announced. I do not want to lose any of my drives because of a really stupid bug.

I have the same problem: all was ok with 10.8.4 but now, with 10.8.5, if I leave my macbook pro 15" alone, after a while, I can't use it ... exactly same problem of you.

I have this issue on multiple 10.8.5 machines too. Infuriating. All my efforts to hack together "no sleep" scripts haven't worked so far. I'm trying Jason's suggestion here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5304849?answerId=23004333022#23004333022 and crossing my fingers it works until Apple issues a fix.

Alternatively I wonder if you could manually use pmset to set the disksleep value to something really large so that it just never times out.

In another thread users are reporting that setting the display sleep option to never seems to resolve the hard drive sleep problem.