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

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.

As you can see, the setting is set to not sleep:

AC Power:

powerbutton 1

standbydelay 4200

standby 1

ttyskeepawake 1

hibernatemode 0

hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage

womp 1

displaysleep 5

networkoversleep 0

sleep 0

halfdim 1

autorestart 1

disksleep 0

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Sep 14, 2013 11:47 AM

23 replies

HenryAZ

Level 1

5 points

Sep 18, 2013 7:28 AM in response to A Bite of Apple

A Bite of Apple wrote:

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

Yes, the Recovery partition reinstall would download 10.8.5. To do what you want, you would need to have saved the 10.8.4 installer package. Make a bootable USB stick from that package, boot from that USB, select reinstall, and it would reinstall the system files only for 10.8.4 (leave your data alone).

HenryAZ

Level 1

5 points

Sep 18, 2013 7:40 AM in response to MatthewWhalen

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 am experiencing this problem as well. All platter drives (internal and external), that are not the boot drive, are spinning down with the DisplaySleep setting. The drives are ignoring the "put drives to sleep" checkbox being unchecked. They follow the DisplaySleep setting. If DisplaySleep is set to "0", then the drives do not spin down.

I have tried SMC reset, PRAM reset, Safe Boot, a new Admin user account, and none of those procedures result in any change. I have also tried setting DiskSleep to a positive number (with pmset), but it is ignored in favor of the DisplaySleep setting.

My nightly automated backup copies to a drive that is now sleeping when the backup runs. Fortunately, Carbon Copy Cloner seems to have the know-how to wake up the drive, and to wait for the drive to wake up, before running the clone operation. In the logs, I note a 4 second delay from initiation of the job until it actually starts cloning. Prior to 10.8.5, there was no 4 second delay, because the drive was not sleeping. I have booted from the clone, so it is doing a good backup.