10.8.5 puts drives to sleep... forever

I'm having the same problem on my 15" MacBook Pro (Early 2008). As a result, my system is essentially unusable if I walk away from it for more than few minutes.

Similar thing here on Mac Mini Server (Late 2012) with two eSATA raids connected via Lacie Thunderbolt Hub:

Despite "Put hard drives to sleep when possible" unchecked in Energy Saver, external raids go to sleep.

Very annoying because there's four drives in every raid group and it takes ages for them to wake up again when trying to acces them over the network..

Also tried "pmset -g" in terminal, disksleep is already set to 0.

On 10.8.4 and before everything worked smoothly.

Updated with 10.8.5 combo installer and having this issue.

I'm having the exact same issue. I have a vantec USB 3.0 enclosure with 4 drives in it running off my late-2012 27" iMac. If I leave my machine or allow the display to sleep, the external drives all disconnect. Only way to bring them back is reboot or turn off and re-connect the enclosure. Worked fine on 10.8.4.

I'm having a similar issue. Although for me, the external drives will spin back up when I need them to, but I don't want them to go to sleep at all. It was fine on 10.8.4, but now when I'm not at my Mac, I can hear my FW800 drive constantly going to sleep and then a minute later spinning back up again over and over.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback

For what it's worth, I've been able to temporarily alleviate this problem by going to the Energy Saver settings in System Preferences, and disabling the display from sleeping. Although this is sub-optimal, since it means my monitor is always on, it's certainly preferred to the problem with my external drives disconnecting for no good reason.

Same issue here since updating to 10.8.5 yesterday. I tried to access data on my mac mini from my laptop in another room. Couldn't reach the drives. I went to my mac mini and saw my 2 external USB drives lights were off. I clicked on the desktop icons, and after a few seconds the drive lights came on and data was accessable. No problems like this before the update. I just sent Apple feedback. Hopefully they'll fix this issue.

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.

Keep Drive Spinning it is 5th.

Dear Eric,

this is not the solution. Apple has to fix this issue.

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.

It's clear that Apple has introduced a bug when it improved power management (according to this item, which refers to the features of the very build before the release version - http://www.cultofmac.com/243702/apple-seeds-os-x-10-8-5-build-12f36-to-developer s/)

Thanks Eric,

This solution has temporarily returned my setup to normal (I can once again allow my display to turn off automatically without having to worry about all my external drives going AWOL). Hopefully Apple can provide a permanent solution in the next system update.

I want to say thank you to Eric for his script as well, it's a good temporary solution until Apple fixes the problem.

I have this problem too, and I'm not happy about it. I have six external drives attached, and when they go to sleep I have to wait almost a minute for my iMac to be usable again as they all spin up. I've even tried to manually run pmset and reboot, but it still ignores that spinning down is turned off.

-Chris