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10.8.5 puts drives to sleep... forever

Today I updated two systems to 10.8.5: A Mac Pro (Early 2009) and a Mac Mini Server (Late 2012).


Prior to the update I had "Put hard drives to sleep when possible" unchecked in Energy Saver, since I use both systems constantly--and drive sleep just results in lower performance, and more wear-and-tear on the drives.


After 10.8.5, drives will sleep (despite the setting), then never wake up. The drives themselves may spin up, but the OS does not see them. E.g., Finder will give a spinning beach ball when attempting to view the drive, any app with a file open on such a drive will lock up, Terminal will hang on ls of the drive, etc.


This is happening on internal and external drives on both systems.


The only way to get the drives back is to reboot.



Given the severity of this issue, I am restoring my systems from Time Machine backups to OS X 10.8.4.

MAC MINI SERVER (LATE 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Sep 12, 2013 7:17 PM

Reply
82 replies

Oct 1, 2013 3:49 PM in response to rseward

rseward wrote:


Hi All,


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


If anyone can suggest new approaches I'd be happy to hear them.


Sure, wait for Apple to release a fix. It's only been about a week since Apple said they were working on a supplemental update to OS X 10.8.5 for this and a couple of other issues. If you want it fixed right then wait for the official patch.

Oct 3, 2013 6:40 PM in response to lkrupp

The supplemental update to OS X 10.8.5 was released today. I have installed it wihtout issue and, as of right now, it appears to have fixed my problem. Like others my external drives would go to sleep regardless of the Energy Saver preference panel. I was not experiencing the issue of the drives being ejected and requiring a restart to remount them.


My external drives no longer go to sleep and appear to be following the Energy Saver setting.

Oct 4, 2013 2:58 PM in response to jobalo

I am now having issues with apps crashing as well, especially frustrating as I'm a developer and my own apps are some of the ones that are crashing, but they run fine on my 10.8.4 MacBook Air, and these are crashes I've never seen before.


I am installing the Combo Update from Apple's site as we speak, and will report back once I've restarted.

Oct 4, 2013 8:36 PM in response to HenryAZ

<blockquote>lakospeter wrote:


I have this milder variant too: I have set OS X not to put the drives to sleep, but it does do that since the 10.8.5 update. When I start using the computer again, I have no problem with waking up the drives, but I'd rather keep them running constantly.


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.</blockquote>


This describes my issue exactly, and it started directly after 10.8.5. I have 5 total hard drives in 2010 MP, and it happens to all of them.

Oct 8, 2013 5:32 PM in response to jobalo

I've been running the Supplemental Update on my Mini Server for a couple of days now. The Mini is back to behaving like it was on 10.8.4. It is worth noting that I made a Time Machine backup, used the 10.8.5 Combo Updater, then used the 10.8.5 Supplemental Update download to bring the Mini up-to-date. I did not use the App Store.


So it appears that the issues that I opened this thread about have been fixed.

10.8.5 puts drives to sleep... forever

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