Lacie disk on FW not sleeping after installing Mavericks

It seems a bit premature to kill off FW drives so soon. There must be billions of them out there. I sure have enough of them. Various programs point to various sections of these drives. To unmount and mount as required is waste of time. Now I'm forced to hook most of them up as USB 2.0. That's a step in a postive direction?

lcrooks wrote:

Beyond that Apple considers FW "dead tech"...there will be no solution from Apple (I have been saying this for months).

I replaced my FW drives with Thunderbolt ones last year and they work perfectly.

I wish my Thunderbolt drives worked. They are doing they same thing the FW800 drives are doing, not sleeping.

USB is the ONLY port working properly. I guess the Thunderbolt port now have the same feature as the FW800.

Never let them spin down.

I was fairly sure I tried the various combinations of powering on with drives connected and connecting drives after powering on, verifying sleep, rebooting, etc. Regardless, I repeated all that, and can say that FW800 drives connected to my MacBook Pro after 10.9.3 now honor the Sleep command whether it happens through a command or the Power Save timer. I can reboot with drives connected or disconnected, power down, etc., and the Sleep command is still honored.

The MacBook Pro DOES NOT honor the Checkbox "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" setting for the FW800 drives. It did until Mavericks. HOWEVER, it DOES honor that setting for the internal drive. This foils the argument that Apple is somehow trying to improve lifetime by NOT putting hard drives to sleep. It makes sense for battery mode, but then why do it in power adapter mode? For the non-battery-confused Macs, Apple claims to be a Green Company, so even on the desktops they power down such things when possible. So why not extend the courtesy to the FW connected drives? Or maybe they're just a little 'Green'.

I've given up on the iMac for the time being. It persists in NOT honoring the Sleep command. Although at least now it appears to shutdown gracefully when the FW800 drive is connected. Gracefully = No longer hangs up the shutdown until a forced shutdown is commanded via the power switch long-press. Maybe 10.9.4 will bring the iMacs back into the fold.

even on the desktops they power down such things when possible. So why not extend the courtesy to the FW connected drives?

I answered that a few posts up. Many Firewire drives no longer honour the energy saver settings and never spin down, not even when the Mac is put to sleep. This is by design. It is to address an issue where these drives may spontaneously eject themselves when spinning down. If you do a search of these forums you will find several threads where people are encountering this spontaneous ejecting, which sometimes even results in data loss. It is a problem that seems to occur only with certain types of FireWire bridge chipsets, and the companies that make these chipsets have, as of yet, not been interested in fixing it.

So that leaves Apple with customers with FireWire drives that spontaneously eject themselves when they spin down, with only one way of fixing the problem - keep them spinning as long as the drive's volumes remain mounted. And that's exactly what Apple has done.

Ozzies you may have a separate issue with your drives. It may be worth reviewing your energy settings in terminal. Numerous sources inside and external to this forum have confirmed that thunderbolt drives enter standby mode normally. There may be another issue you are experiencing with your tbolt drives?

Icrooks, not sure how to look for this in Terminal, but having multiple iMacs and a Mac Mini display the same exact problem is what makes me question anything in Terminal that I would find. I also did a data capture with Apple Engineers when this problem started. After a couple of months of no answer they offered to help me revert my Macs back to Mountain Lion.

I actually did that with one of the Macs and the Thunderbolt on that Mac works just fine with the external drive.

"This is by design. It is to address an issue where these drives may spontaneously eject themselves when spinning down. If you do a search of these forums you will find several threads where people are encountering this spontaneous ejecting, which sometimes even results in data loss. It is a problem that seems to occur only with certain types of FireWire bridge chipsets, and the companies that make these chipsets have, as of yet, not been interested in fixing it.

So that leaves Apple with customers with FireWire drives that spontaneously eject themselves when they spin down, with only one way of fixing the problem - keep them spinning as long as the drive's volumes remain mounted. And that's exactly what Apple has done."

I saw that, and chose to ignore it. If indeed Apple did this intentionally, then, at least for my MacBook Pro, they have UNDONE it with 10.9.3. Furthermore, ejecting volumes itself has problems as volumes REMOUNT if you logout of your account after demounting them. That also puts a wrench in their supposed 'fix'. Yet another vagary of Mavericks. Personally, if FW sets indeed have been a problem, I would have installed a control (checkbox) long ago so the user could decide whether to leave the drives perpetually active. Why did they wait for Mavericks?! Their choice to simply ignore it and make the majority suffer is unacceptable. Admit it, Mavericks is a mess, and I'm being kind.

I have a LaCie Thunderbolt external RAID drive on a new iMac at work and G-Drive and LaCie (both Firewire 800) at home on a brand new iMac at home, both running 10.9.3. Neither system puts the hard drives to sleep.

FWIW, these forums are like talking to a wall. I have had Macs since the early '90s and, as I am sure Apple monitors these forums and uses the information herein to improve their products, they are highly deficient in connecting with their customers.

tb

tommybgood wrote:

I have a LaCie Thunderbolt external RAID drive on a new iMac at work and G-Drive and LaCie (both Firewire 800) at home on a brand new iMac at home, both running 10.9.3. Neither system puts the hard drives to sleep.

FWIW, these forums are like talking to a wall. I have had Macs since the early '90s and, as I am sure Apple monitors these forums and uses the information herein to improve their products, they are highly deficient in connecting with their customers.

tb

With both Firewire and Thunderbolt not working properly Apple seems to be ditching the idea of external drives. I wish they would tell us, out of courtesy if nothing else.

If you want to find out what talking to a wall is really like, try posting and contacting Apple about the mouse cursor/disconnection problems that many of us have been pursuing for 3 years now. What also annoys me is Macworld has never even mentioned these problems let alone offered help—they ignored my request to look into both the mouse and firewire problems. Are they too close to Apple to want to rock the boat?

We talk to walls for two reasons...

1. Profit

2. Apple has no competition (try Windows 8 and get back to me).

tb

I finally gave up and now use USB3 drive and all works. Apple seems to take too long to adress common issues.

USB 3 is all fine and good, but my drives are USB 2, with the exception of the Thunderbolt drive. In the future though, I will get USB 3 drives. Even on my Macbook Pro, certain legacy Firewire hardware peripherals I had were not supported by the Mountain Lion upgrade. It seems that Apple's Firewire and Thunderbolt departments are out of touch with the needs of their customers.

@tommybgood, I think that's a fair statement. I don't expect a technology like FW to be left behind the way it has been. That makes the idea of investing in Thunderbolt illogical. There is a dumbing down happening at Apple that does not bode well on its future.

Same for me with LaCie d2 Quadra. The support from Apple is as bad as it gets.

Having watched this topic for quite some time and avoiding migrating to Mavericks because of a fear of the FW drive not spinning down, I thought it was worth recounting my experience, particularly as it seems counter to that of most.

I have a 2008 iMac and a G-Tech G-Drive fifth generation (FW800 and USB3), and have just done a clean install of 10.9.3, and then migrated my data using the Migration Utility. The G-Drive is used for Time Machine and for Carbon Copy Cloner image copies, so is not used in "normal" operation. I do have the Energy Saver preference to sleep drives when possible.

What is my experience with using the G-Drive attached via FW800?

When using the system, the drive does spin down after some sort of timeout, perhaps of the order of 5 or 10 minutes. As soon as I go to Finder, it spins up.

When I shutdown, the drive spins down immediately.

When I sleep the system, the drive does spin down, but only after a similar timeout of 5 or 10 minutes. This is the only area of difference with my previous use of Mountain Lion, which spun down immediately in these circumstances.

So, I am pretty happy with this. I wonder if my use of a clean install helped, as there are G-Drive users who complain of the problem but G-Tech reckon they have never experienced the problem?