10.8.5 puts drives to sleep... forever

I've done that multiple times with no resolution. Right now, really sick of Apple.

Try reparing disk permissions on the root drive; it worked for me. So far, the hard drives have not gone to sleep.

Yes. It is the worst OS ever. I will not purchase "Mavericks" - disappointed. Always only promises.

Fixing disk permissions on the root drive did not resolve it for me.

While this is probably the most frustrating release that Apple has had since all of the OS X Server debacle, and leaves a lot to be desired from Apple's quality assurance, I see no reason to just flat out discount everything else they do, including an upgrade to Mavericks.

The length of time this has taken to get fixed is pretty ridiculous and Apple should be ashamed. They had iOS 7 lock screen bugs fixed within a week, yet this problem which actually affects real work is taking forever.

I actually thought 10.8.4 was pretty darn stable and for the most part I like Mountain Lion better than Snow Leopard (I skipped Lion, mess that it was). I do think not leaving Rosetta as an option was a mistake, though, although I've found replacements for most things now. I don't know about Mavericks since I haven't tried it or see much about it yet. I think stopping the "big cat" naming thing is a bad move for Mac fans. "Mavericks" sounds dumb (apparently you can't say a word that means "slow" in musical notation on here which makes the site that word), IMO, especially since it's in the plural form. It should just be "Maverick" (like the Western TV Show of the same name or the Top Gun character. A Maverick is an unbranded range animal and all prior versions of OSX were in the singular form so making it plural just sounds out of place). Adding tabs to Finder sounds like an improvement, but I find having dual-pane more useful. I already have both with "XtraFinder" so I really don't need an OS upgrade to get tabs. Beyond that and knowing that Apple dumped AFP for SMB2, I don't really know what's so big/important to make a major revision number other than to get another $20+ out of most Mac owners.

It's pretty obvious by comments from Tim Cook that he doesn't really give a flying crap about OSX anymore. He doesn't even use a Mac unless he has to these days. He's all for the iPad/iOS devices so I don't have much high hopes for killer Macs in the future. The new (and STILL unreleased) Mac Pro looks more like a garbage can than a computer and has no real internal expansion or PCI slots. iMacs are needlessly thin now leaving them stuck with mobile parts for the most part and game development for the Mac is still pretty darn dead (they could have at least made a way to play iOS games on the Mac without needing the developer to do a conversion; there's plenty of games there that would play well on a large monitor). But with the news industry raving how desktops are more or less "dead", what else can we expect? Consoles are a poor substitute for a computer for many types of games, IMO. You can add a joystick or gamepad to a computer, but you can't replace a keyboard/mouse as easily in a console environment.

Mavericks is NOT plural. Mavericks is a proper name. Mavericks is the name of a famous beach in California that is known for its ideal big surfing waves. OS X 10.9 is named after a place, not a person or animal.

Ah, so we went from Cat/Animals to beaches? That makes even less sense, IMO. One would think they'd save such a giant name change for a truly groundbreaking OSX version like OS11, not minor changes that 10.9 seems to have.

MagnusVonMagnum wrote:

Ah, so we went from Cat/Animals to beaches? That makes even less sense, IMO. One would think they'd save such a giant name change for a truly groundbreaking OSX version like OS11, not minor changes that 10.9 seems to have.

They could just follow the clods in Redmond simply call it "Mac OS" and build every other version as pure garbage like Vista and 8.

MagnusVonMagnum wrote:

Ah, so we went from Cat/Animals to beaches? That makes even less sense, IMO. One would think they'd save such a giant name change for a truly groundbreaking OSX version like OS11, not minor changes that 10.9 seems to have.

Merely trying to provide an explanation. I know it's not possible to have a discussion with a know-it-all.

I hate to tell everyone this, but I have the same problem on computers running 10.8.4 as well. I don't think it's just a 10.8.5 problem. My problem started out of the blue a couple of months ago without any system update that I can remember other than the usual Camera Raw updates, printer updates, etc. that shouldn't really affect sleep.

The worst case is a Mid 2011 27" iMac with Apple provided SSD boot drive and 1TB internal HD. I have a Drobo attached via Thunderbolt that keeps spinning down whether the screen is asleep or not. Other USB & Firewire drives do the same. I have computer sleep set to Never and Display Sleep set to 10 minutes. But the drives can spin down while using the computer if not accessing the drive for a while. And when NOT using the computer for an extended period the drives will spin up and back down periodically while the display is asleep.

This also happens on a newer iMac, a MacBook Pro, and rarely on a Mac Pro. The Mac Pro may start doing it if it hasn't been restarted in a long time and some apps have crashed. Restarting it gets the behavior back to normal on it, but not the other computers.

I don't know if it's a 10.8.5 problem or not but I'm seeing my internal drives on my late 2008 (3,1) MacPro wherein the drives are continually being put to sleep, I hear the thermal recalibration going on and then it happens again. I think the whole SATA bus is getting pinged because I see the blinky on the internal DVD blink too. I've tried a a little bit later. I'm about to try setting the display-sleep to never but I'm tired of all this crap on ML. It may have Finally fixed some problems, but I'm not real happy about ML at all.

Hi All,

Useful thread, thanks, but I still can't work around the problem.

I have a 15" MacBook Pro, Early 2011 fitted with two 512GB SSDs (Crucial CT512M4SSD2 512GB m4 2.5-inch SATA 6Gb/s (SATA III) to be precise). Not RAIDed or anything, but with OS on disk 1 in the original hard disk bay and disk 2 (spare, large data etc) in the space origianlly used by the DVD drive. I used Jason's script (thanks Jason) in the hope all would be well. Despite the script, the Mac still refused to return from screen saver.

Interestingly, the "wakey" data file on disk 1 (with OS, original hard disk bay) had a date/time stamp 15 minutes older than that in the "wakey" data file on disk 2 (which was right before I had to switch-off the Mac to restart it). So it looks like the OS drive is still being put to sleep by OS X 10.8.5 despite the script.

BTW this is after a fresh re-install of OS X, and with both computer- and display-sleep set to 1 hour (and, no, the Mac failed before the 1 hour timer). If anyone can suggest new approaches I'd be happy to hear them. I may try and swap the two SSDs in case the drive itself is at fault (Disk 1 is 1 year older than disk 2, as it happens). I'll post again if I get more data.

Thanks jobalo - that seems to address the sleep issue but has uncovered a different (worse) issue: Finder goes unresponsive on me. So it seems my issue is covered by https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5306617 here's hoping that Apple ship a patch soon.