Lacie disk on FW not sleeping after installing Mavericks

FWIW, those people experiencing the not spinning down problem for certain brands of external drives via FireWire on Mavericks, I just updated my G-Drive firmware and that seems to have fixed the problem for me. (USB 3 was not an option as my 2009 iMac does not have it).

G-Drive never had firmware for Apple before. My understanding from G-Technology is they use Apple software to run their drives.

Certainly worth a try, have a link from the one you used?

Found these links:

http://support.g-technology.com/support/firmware-updates

Got this pop up which surprises me the Apple considers G-Technology

an unidentified developer.

Installed the G-Technology firmware update which required a reboot.

I have two G-Drives mounted via firewire on a daisy chain.

Now after reboot the daisy chained G-Drive does not re-load, it required me

to turn it off then back on.

Also external drives connected via firewire still do not go to sleep.

The firmware in my case introduced a new problem with the daisy chained

drive not loading.

Will re-boot one more time and see if not I will have to use time machine to

at least undo the new problem.

Did a second re-boot, the issue was not solved with the firmware update but

introduced the new issue previously mentioned. Rest everything back with

time machine and now I am back with the original issue of fire wire not sleeping

after Mavericks or update.

My iMac is a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7

Running OS X 10.9.5

Firewire issue unresolved.

Hi OzziesMAC

For the firmware install to complete you have to unmount the drive (and any others later in the chain), turn it off with the power switch, unplug all firewire connections, turn it on again, wait for a little while (not sure how long), turn it off again, plug all the firewire cables back, and then turn on again.

If all that worked, you can run the updater again and it will confirm that the latest firmware is installed.

My suspicion is that your drive is stuck half way through the update process :-(

And yes, you have to right click to open the updater to bypass the unidentified developer warning.

Hello!

I sent my third bug report regarding this problem to Apple via bugreport.apple.com. The first two are only duplicates to closed bugreports. :-(

Maybe I get another reaction this time.

And maybe some people writing in this thread also send a bugreport to Apple. Maybe they react some time.

Hi carstenf,

You won't get a response to filing bug reports about this issue. Apple considers this to be not a bug, but a feature.

Still does not work

This issue has been debated endlessly and nothing has changed. There seems to be a view that Apple made a change in Mavericks, probably for a very good reason, and that their view is that this is working to design.

However, there are some of us with other makes of disk, such as G-Tech in my case, where the behaviour did change subtlety with Mavericks but where they do spin down most circumstances. That suggests to me that this is a problem that can only be resolved via changes to the firmware of the particular drives that suffer the problem. Maybe, rather than waiting, maybe forever, for Apple to make a change, the only productive approach to take is to either adopt one of the unmount solutions that have been suggested, OR to press the manufacturer of the disk drive to modify their firmware.

Since Apple is now removing the FW ports from the new Macs I do not expect this issue to get addressed by Apple. They have moved on.

On Mountain Lion I used to have all four of my La Cie external drives on Firewire 800. On Mavericks none of them would sleep when the computer slept (their discs kept running continuously). I had to eject each then switch their mains power supply off. With only two USB (2) sockets left after use by other peripherals, my solution was is to change the data connections of two of my ext. Firewire drives to USB (USB 2). One is my daily backup made automatically by Carbon Copy Cloner during each night and the other drive has two partitions, one for Time Machine and the other for my (manual) monthly backup. These three operations do not need the higher speed of Firewire. The two other drives have to be still on Firewire (due to there being no spare USB sockets). One of them I use for legacy files and the other for occasional use of Final Cut Pro (a video editor).

This has has worked for me ever since Mavericks was launched, although I recognise that other users need to use the higher speed of Firewire and to have them immediately available at all times. I see no solution available, ever, for sleepless Firewire drives, except switching them on when you use the computer and ejecting and switching off after you have finished—a clumsy way to work, especially for a computer system advertisedby Apple (but only during Steve Jobs' days which is significant) with the mantra "It just works".

So I think the best thing is to revert to Mountain Lion, or buy a new Mac with USB 3 (which I think is faster than Firewire 800), or with Thunderbolt, and get over the fact that Apple is no longer the wonderful company we thought it was. Its a disgrace that they have not even acknowledged this problem, and that it appears to be continuing in Yosemite.

I asked a 'genius' at the apple store if this bug was fixed in Yosemite, and, I kid you not, his reply was:

"what's FireWire?'

I think that perfectly sums up Apple's views on this issue.....

Now that Apple has removed all the FW ports from the new Mac's I do not expect any more changes that would address this issue.

I never paid much attention before (and most users wouldn't either) but I noticed that I have getting some console messages indicating "wakeups resource spin" if I started an application and noticed my external USB hard drive would start to spin up. I was using this as my Time machine and it would spin down between backups but for no apparent reason would spin up if starting various programs. Tried every possible fix but no luck keeping it from spinning up. I then decided to keep my drive spinning except when my Mac would sleep or shut down at night. Now no more messages. I wonder if Apple did this with FW drives to preclude these logs as well. I figured since my TM drive had to spin up every hour anyway it might as well just stay spinning in between. I do not expect much wear from this approach.

Console messages returned so the fix did not work very long.