Lacie disk on FW not sleeping after installing Mavericks

Thanks. I'm not willing to revert to Mt. Lion, so I'll probably just get a USB 3 enclosure.

Another matter regarding this non-sleep behavior, I find that even if I unmount the drives, they continue to spin. And what even more curious, there is some disk activity that continues to occur. Have you noticed this?

It's getting worse for me. I have only been turning my external drives on when needed. Recently I have noticed that when I turn on one of my G-drives it makes unusual noises - kindof like the Mac is thrashing looking for space on that drive, heads just flyinmg around for no apparent reason. And they'll keep doing it after being ejected until the drive is powered off.

However the data seems to be intact and the drive behaves fine if I conect it to USB. But using it on firewire now makes me think Mavericks will destroy it.

Although I would have thought this was the kind of issue Apple would address, this thread is leading me to believe they are happy for us to simply downgrade the OS. Since I upgraded from Snow Leopard and bought a number of 64bit only apps, I am hesitant to this. Right now it looks like my best solution is to buy a USB hub.

It was refreshing to see the way Apple responded to the GMail and iWork issues. I wish they would demonstrate similar openess with this issue.

What I am wrote:

Thanks. I'm not willing to revert to Mt. Lion, so I'll probably just get a USB 3 enclosure.

Another matter regarding this non-sleep behavior, I find that even if I unmount the drives, they continue to spin. And what even more curious, there is some disk activity that continues to occur. Have you noticed this?

Yes. I have noticed this for many years. My guess is that the Mac will normally do some housekeeping now and then when nothing much is happening (eg., you are not emailing, surfing the Internet, backing up the system disc). With a drive still on and spinning it takes the opportunity. If the drive is shut down, the Mac stores where it was and what it was doing and just waits for the next opportunity to continue where it left off.

I guess that Apple will be taking a strictly commercial view of this bug. Of the many millions of Maveracks that it has and will sell in the next few months, the proportion of people caught by the bug must be very tiny, so why bother. The missing cursor bug has plagued some users for 2 1/2 years with no recognition of it by Apple, let alone a fix. For the individual like me, with the mouse bug and now the firewire bug (what next?), Macs are no longer the wonderful product it has been. For me, noting the lack of complaints from my all-Windows friends and family running modern machines, jumping ship is beginning to look attractive.

SteveKir wrote:

Yes. I have noticed this for many years. My guess is that the Mac will normally do some housekeeping now and then when nothing much is happening (eg., you are not emailing, surfing the Internet, backing up the system disc). With a drive still on and spinning it takes the opportunity. If the drive is shut down, the Mac stores where it was and what it was doing and just waits for the next opportunity to continue where it left off.

But this is contiuous, it never stops, even when I unmount the drive.

I guess that Apple will be taking a strictly commercial view of this bug. Of the many millions of Maveracks that it has and will sell in the next few months, the proportion of people caught by the bug must be very tiny, so why bother. The missing cursor bug has plagued some users for 2 1/2 years with no recognition of it by Apple, let alone a fix. For the individual like me, with the mouse bug and now the firewire bug (what next?), Macs are no longer the wonderful product it has been. For me, noting the lack of complaints from my all-Windows friends and family running modern machines, jumping ship is beginning to look attractive.

If it were just Firewire maybe so, but Thunderbolt is the latest and greatest, and a lot of people are going to be hanging Thunderbolt drives on their new Mac Pros. I think (hope) that they have to fix this.

I agree - I think the fact that t bolt drives are also affected will prompt them to fix this by the end of December - especially for the Mac pro.

I will call apple enterprise tomorrow and see if they are working on a fix - they know what's going on a lot better than regular apple support - don't jump ship yet.

Just downloaded 10.9.1 - the update did NOT solve the issue on my iMac + two FW WD disks.

Not surprising - in the list of 10.9.1 updates it does not mention solving the issue with external disks

I did find one temporary solution that seems to be working well for me - I program under energy settings for my mac mini to shut down at around 2 am and then wake up at 7 am. The shut down causes both the thunderbolt and FW G-Drives to spin down and sleep. Then upon restart they are available again. It seems the external drives will sleep if you program your mac to shut down as opposed to sleep. I know it's annoying and more of a hassle - but at least its a temporary solution.

Any other ideas or helpful hints?

Everyone should be aware that Apple's record in dealing with FireWire issues is not inspiring. Some years ago, when the 10.3 or 10.4 OS appeared, FW400 drives simply stopped working. At the subsequent major upgrade - 10.4 or 10.5 - functionality was restored. It’s worrying, not least because I assumed Apple devised the FW protocols.

I agree that they have been extremely slow to respond to this issue. However, I agree with a previous post - because this issue also affects Thunderbolt drives they will be under pressure to fix this issue - particularly with the release of the Mac Pro.

lcrooks wrote:

Not surprising - in the list of 10.9.1 updates it does not mention solving the issue with external disks

I did find one temporary solution that seems to be working well for me - I program under energy settings for my mac mini to shut down at around 2 am and then wake up at 7 am. The shut down causes both the thunderbolt and FW G-Drives to spin down and sleep. Then upon restart they are available again. It seems the external drives will sleep if you program your mac to shut down as opposed to sleep. I know it's annoying and more of a hassle - but at least its a temporary solution.

Any other ideas or helpful hints?

If a drive is used frequently over 24 hours, like with Time Machine, a possible workaround is to switch on the TM drive every morning, cause a backup and then switch the drive off. At least you will have a daily TM backup which is still a useful thing to have.

If in adition like me you have a daily clone made automatically at the start of the day of the internal drive on to an external disc using Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper, you could de-activate the automatic cloning and also switch that drive on every morning and manually cause it to make its backup, then switch the drive off afterwards.

You would have quite good backup security with the minor chores (in my case) of switching two drives on and off each day, but the Mac itself would not have to be shut down every day (which I am told is not a good thing). So its a balance between switching on and off external drives or shutting down then restarting the Mac.

Or revert to Mountain Lion until the bug is fixed or OS 10 comes along.

Some comments and questions:

I have invested in three NewTech Voyager Q docks. I have older Macs they dont' have USB 3, so Firewire 800 in this case is the fastest available interface. Anyone know if this effects docks as well as enclosures? I presume it would, since they are all basicallly using a SATA bridge.

Next, I use alot of WD Green drives (versus the Black model). These drives have variable spin and supposedly are programmed in the ROM to spin down on their own after a period of inactivity SEPARATE from any OS induced spin down or sleep signal. I've confirmed this under Mountain Lion. Even with the OS settings set to never sleep or not put the HD to sleep, the Green drives will spin down on their own when mounted in the Voyager dock after the designated built in time span is reached (I can't remember and I haven't timed it, but it "feels" like 5-10 minutes).

My understanding is that Black drives will remain spinning at full speed on their own (being high performance drives) unless instructed to sleep by the OS. I'm wondering if this built in spin down feature in the Green drives will OVERRIDE whatever is happening in Mavericks that keeps drives from sleeping; probably not, since the drive will interpret any signal coming in as activity and disengage its built in spin down routine.

Lastly, with Tbolt and USB 3 now available on new Macs, does one get the feeling that Apple internally would love to just see Firewire, frankly, go away? It would be great if NEwTech would issue a dock with native TBolt connection. It is ironic that I spent $80 a piece for a great dock that supports no less than FIVE interfaces (eSata, USB 3, USB 2, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800) but for various reasons, none are really optimal on my Mac at this time, which is only a few years old, and perfectly capable of running Mavericks, but doesn't have Tbolt or USB3.

Lastly, for any firewire experts I have a question. With Firewire 400, I ran a FW hub and never worried about what was first/last on the chain and hot swapping was never an issue, period. With FW 800, I don't see any 9 pin hubs available, it appears the preferred method with FW800 is to chain everything, and hot swapping is a hit/miss proposition (you have to worry about which device is last, and removing a devic ein the middle of the chain often kills everything until you reboot). Am I doing something wrong or has FW 800 actually taken a step back from FW 400, other than speed. I use to be able to setup 4 Voyager docks on FW400 on a hub and unmount and hotswap all day long, never worrying about who was first/last. Now I have carefully think about the order of everything and I can't turn off or unmount anything in the middle of the chain. Tbolt is also a chained interface too, correct? SAme issue with hotswapping or unmounting devices in the middle?

installed Mavericks on a spare drive, here's what I found.

1) yes, Voyager Docks via Firewire also are effected, will not sleep or spin down. Switch to USB, no issues.

2) WD Green drives which are programmed in ROM to spin down on their own, and do that in Mountain Lion, also are effected in Mavericks. so, there is some signal coming through the firewire bus that the drive accepts as 'activity' and therefore the built in spin down routine never kicks in. And even though Green drives are supposed to run more economically (i.e. 'green') and conserve heat and power, let me tell you, any drive, that spins constantly at full speed, even a 'green' one, gets hot. And I suspect these green drives, which are NOT intended to run full speed all the time, are probably more susceptable to failure and shortening of life span due to this issue. Logically, it is just more wear and tear and the green drives aren't built as well to take it. At least Black drives and other full speed 7200+ RPM drives are designed for extended operation and full spin speed.

3) After talking to some tech/hardware guys I know, they are not convinced that just because Tbolt connections are also effected by this 'bug', does that mean Apple will do anything. Because Tbolt is designed as the 'new' USB that can support multiple protocols over it's bus, AND because it is a chained topology, it requires that signals are constantly going up and down the chain. Rmember , Tbolt supports not just drives, but displays, ethernet, audio, basically any data. Even though data packets are ID'ed, because it all goes through a chain, if you have a drive in the middle of the chain and for example, a display at the end, the signals for the display are still passing through Tbolt bridge on the drive. At a minimum, there is a small amount of handshaking going on so the drive can monitor traffic coming through its bus, to see if a data packet is intended for it or whether to ignore it. Again, this is what I am told, I'm not an engineer.

It seems to me USB doesn't have this problem, and it is also a bus with multiple signals and devices going through....

Anyway, since my WD green drives that I use are low spin spin drives, the data transfer rate difference between USB 2 and Firewire800 in REAL world terms is not as great as you'd think looking at just rated specs. They still top out at 25MBs to 30MBs on either bus, so I've decided to switch to Mavericks and use my Voyager docks and Green drives on USB.

Obviously if I were using full 7200 RPM performance drives, then switching back to USB 2 from Firewire 800 would be a much greater performance hit, but with WD green drives, I don't seem to really notice. IT's mainly for backup annd I'm not hitting the drive constantly.

Guys the Mac Pros are shipping in February - they need to fix this problem by then for the Tbolt connected drives. I will call Apple Enterprise and ensure they are fixing the problem. When Mavericks Server rolled out the VPN feature was not working (one of the main reasons to have a server in the first place). Apple rolled out a fix for this about 2 weeks ago. They will fix this issue to - otherwise this will have major adverse effects on all users of the Mac Pro and they don't want to upset this demographic.

I solved this - for a day. I run a Mac Pro with 4x2TB on-board drives and 1x4Tb external which, until the other day, was refusing to sleep under Mavericks.

What happened was simply that I had to transfer a copy of Fetch from another disk onto the Mavericks installation. The other disc was actually running Mountain Lion, so I went in to get the Fetch Prefs so that I wouldn’t have to enter all my shortcuts again. To do this, Fetch advised that I use the inbuilt menu option to “save shortcuts”, which I did, then attempted to set the save location as the Mavericks disc. The system told me that I didn’t have the permissions to do this, so I simply used the ‘Start Up disc’ option in System prefs to select the Mavericks disc and rebooted into that installation.

When I looked at the Mavericks desktop, the file I’d been told couldn’t be saved there from the ML disc was there. Even more interestingly, Fetch recognised the shortcuts, even though I hadn’t saved them in the Fetch Prefs location.

What followed was odder still: the 4TB external disc went to sleep. It woke on command, and then went back to sleep after a period of inactivity. It behaved perfectly for the rest of the day, but - unfortunately - didn’t survive the shut down and power up the following day.

I don’t know if this helps anyone to determine what’s wrong, but it’s obviously something that can be solved.

mc_ringbearer wrote:

installed Mavericks on a spare drive, here's what I found.

1) yes, Voyager Docks via Firewire also are effected, will not sleep or spin down. Switch to USB, no issues.

2) WD Green drives which are programmed in ROM to spin down on their own, and do that in Mountain Lion, also are effected in Mavericks. so, there is some signal coming through the firewire bus that the drive accepts as 'activity' and therefore the built in spin down routine never kicks in. And even though Green drives are supposed to run more economically (i.e. 'green') and conserve heat and power, let me tell you, any drive, that spins constantly at full speed, even a 'green' one, gets hot. And I suspect these green drives, which are NOT intended to run full speed all the time, are probably more susceptable to failure and shortening of life span due to this issue. Logically, it is just more wear and tear and the green drives aren't built as well to take it. At least Black drives and other full speed 7200+ RPM drives are designed for extended operation and full spin speed.

3) After talking to some tech/hardware guys I know, they are not convinced that just because Tbolt connections are also effected by this 'bug', does that mean Apple will do anything. Because Tbolt is designed as the 'new' USB that can support multiple protocols over it's bus, AND because it is a chained topology, it requires that signals are constantly going up and down the chain. Rmember , Tbolt supports not just drives, but displays, ethernet, audio, basically any data. Even though data packets are ID'ed, because it all goes through a chain, if you have a drive in the middle of the chain and for example, a display at the end, the signals for the display are still passing through Tbolt bridge on the drive. At a minimum, there is a small amount of handshaking going on so the drive can monitor traffic coming through its bus, to see if a data packet is intended for it or whether to ignore it. Again, this is what I am told, I'm not an engineer.

It seems to me USB doesn't have this problem, and it is also a bus with multiple signals and devices going through....

Anyway, since my WD green drives that I use are low spin spin drives, the data transfer rate difference between USB 2 and Firewire800 in REAL world terms is not as great as you'd think looking at just rated specs. They still top out at 25MBs to 30MBs on either bus, so I've decided to switch to Mavericks and use my Voyager docks and Green drives on USB.

Obviously if I were using full 7200 RPM performance drives, then switching back to USB 2 from Firewire 800 would be a much greater performance hit, but with WD green drives, I don't seem to really notice. IT's mainly for backup annd I'm not hitting the drive constantly.

The reason I need an external drive to be mounted all the time is for Time Machine. Obviously, TM will not work automatically if it has to have its power supply switched on manually and the drive mounted for every backup. (My other Firewire drives are normally switched off.) For that reason I reverted to Mountain Lion (because of the Firewire no-sleep bug). Following your idea of switching drives from firewire to USB, (because they will sleep) I have experimented (in Mountain Lion) by changing my Time Machine drive which (was connected via firewire) to USB (it being a multi-connection type). Just by changing the cable connection, using the same actual drive. The purpose was to see whether the slower USB connection would make the computer slower in general use with TM operating every few hours.

It has not. I cannot see any difference. Therefore, a USB TM drive is feasible. I have therefore left my TM drive on USB. I will now re-download Mavericks and install it, and see whether my USB TM drive will sleep when the iMac sleeps. I think it will because I have a USB drive as one of my backups and when running Mavericks before Christmas, I noted that the drive slept OK. Whether that does or does not solve my problem of the TM drive not sleeping, I will post the result in a few days.