10.8.5 putting external drive to sleep regardless of "Energy Saver" setting.

Mathew,

Unfortunately this is a known "bug" (or feature depending on how you feel about it). 😉

Best advice, fall back to a 10.8.4 backup.

Did you already try to set the sleeptime to a very high value (in the hope that you/some process) accesses the files?

i also tried the "keep my drive spinning app" but for me the external drives still went to sleep. As it worked w/o any app on 10.8.4 this clearly is a regression.

To Apple-Devs (in case any OSX releted one eads this)

Please fix that regression. Its a BUG. Someone already suggested that if you do not put your display to sleep on an imac the drives do not spin down. !! What kind of an energy saving option is this?

Either the "put drives to sleep"-Option applies to all drives or you at least provide two options - one for internal, one for external drives. Constant spin up/down puts a lot of more stress on drives (at least the ones i'm using) than having the run constantly.

regards

I can confirm same thing. Relying here on "no-sleep" on external drive for fast access to server. After update to 10.8.5, drive goes to sleep in a few minutes. Re-confirmed Energy Saver pref being set to "no disk sleep" and toggled. Did not help.

Awating quick Apple fix!

Mac Mini 2009 + OWC Maximus mirrored drive

10.8.5 on my iMac and my external drives stay on, time machine works as normal. Not sure whats happening. Did you repair permissions and have you tried a SMC reset?

This bug also affects internal hard drives. Turning off monitor sleep mode "fixes" the problem but who wants to leave their monitor on all the time. This is a serious bug - don't understand how this got through beta testing.

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/)

Indeed, mstan, I see now that setting monitor sleep no 'never' does relieve the problem. At least there's a workaround while we get a fix... Looks like they accidentally connected the two...

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

Or you can use your Apple ID to register with this site and go the Apple BugReporter. Supposedly you will get an answer if you submit feedback.

Feedback via Apple Developer

You're right, Eric. I just sent feedback... Thanks for the link.

My 2010 Mac Mini server is having this same issue. If the time span has been short when my external HDD has fall asleep, I can maybe wake it up again. But an over night sleep has caused it to corrupt the drive, & I had to reformat it (losing all data) to get it to work properly again. Followed the advise of turning off monitor sleep as a work around, but that doesn't seem like it should be the correct solution. I too have sent feedback to hopefully make them aware of this bug and fix it. Here's hoping Mavericks might also squash it.

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)

Do you need to set it to NEVER for display sleep in order to get that "fix" to work on the drives? Because my hard drive has spun down while typing on here and my monitor sure as heck never turned off (and is set to like 45 minutes before it "sleeps"). Before 10.8.5, my WD external drive would spin down after 10 minutes of inactivity even with the "put drives to sleep" option off since that's what its firmware is set to do. Something like Keep Drive Spinning could prevent that. Now it just IGNORES all settings and tries to put the drive to sleep a couple of minutes after the drive is not accessed at most. In fact, I think it might actually count out a few minutes even when you're using it sometimes and the second the drive isn't accessed it goes to sleep even if Keep Drive Spinning wakes it up 20-30 seconds later even. It just seems to not reset its timer even if you use the drive since it falls asleep even when I'm accessing photos and just pause it on a photo in XBMC in another room for 30 seconds or so. The next photo takes like 20 seconds to load because the drive has to spin back up. It's AWFUL. Somehow I just seriously doubt Apple will have a fix ANY time soon. I wish I had backed this thing up more recently. I hate having to redo other updates do to a bug I didn't know even existed right away. This has to rank up there with one of the most annoying bugs Apple has ever introduced in an update, IMO.

Yes, it has to be set to never sleep. Agree it is extremely annoying. I have since gone back to 10.8.4.

Would someone pls answer this: If I were to do a reinstall of Mountain Lion using the Recovery partition to get back to 10.8.4 (I have no system backup), what version of ML does it install? I know it downloads additional stuff, and if it's the latest, ie 10.8.5, it's not worth doing.

Thanks

MatthewWhalen wrote:

After upgrading to 10.8.5, my external drives are being put to sleep regardless of the setting in the "Energy Saver" preferences panel.

On its own this isn't so bad, but Time Machine is now failing because of this.

I'm seeing this too on my system. However, Time Machine is wokring just fine. The drive wakes up when Time Machine does its thing and then goes back to sleep after awhile.