Lacie disk on FW not sleeping after installing Mavericks

That's strange because the drive sleeps when i change smb2 to afp on my system.

Can you check and post your power management settings from terminal?

Also can you post how you changed the default file sharing on your system - that may also be the issue.

lcrooks wrote:

That's strange because the drive sleeps when i change smb2 to afp on my system

How exactly did you change your setting?

lcrooks wrote:

If you want your FireWire drive to sleep during use then just change default smb2 to afp and ensure the sleep feature for hard disks when not in use is checked under energy settings. This allowed my FireWire drive to sleep. You lose a lot of performance this way, but it will achieve the result you desire.

As a non-techie, how would I do that please? If it involves Terminal, what would the text be please?

I would also like to know how to do the switch from SMB2 to AFP.

Do you mean changing options in sharing sys preferens panel?

I tried switching from one to the other, mantaining both, and then changing back to afp, but the behaviour of my LaCie connected via FW800-TBolt adapter hasn't changed.

Gents,

I spent several hours last night Googling and studying to try to figure out how to use afp to mount external drives. I am NOT that technical. I didn't succeed, but here's what I did if it gives someone else a clue to carry on the fight, or perhaps I totally went down the wrong path.

I allowed my system to normally mount the external firewire drive (boot up with external dock turned on and drive inserted). I then unmounted the drive using Disk Utility. I then opened Terminal and tried various forms of the 'mount_afp' command. There is probably a way to set the default, I couldn't find any info on that, so the 'mount_afp' was the only other thing I could think of. Now typically, mount_afp or forms of 'afp://xxx/ss' are used to attach clients that have a share defined, so maybe mounting a bare drive that is not part of a share within a system is not possible using this command. For the record, the drive is not being used for TM, just as a general archive disk, so ownership is set to 'Ignore ownership on this drive' when you look at Get Info. don't know if that is significant, but it seems 'mount_afp' requires a username/pw as part of the command, so I just used my admin login

In short, I never got the drive to mount. I believe there were some error codes returned, sometimes the prompt would just come back with no error code returned (at least not in text at the prompt, there may have been a return code), sometimes the command resulted in error code '2'. I know there are ways to setup a shell script to test for the return code, but I'm not savvy enough to write it.

Also, are we to understand then that Apple Enterprise is stating that SMB2 is now used as the default file protocol for ALL interfaces, meaning USB, Tbolt and Firewire? If we are to believe AE's explanation given to Lcrooks, then why do drives sleep fine using USB but not FW, if they are both using SMB2 now? Or is AE claiming that USB connections still use AFP, but FW now uses SMB2 by default? OR is it only the combination of SMB2 and FW? The whole explanation from AE as described doesn't quite fly; there's something missing or that is not being told. If it's an 'intended' outcome of using SMB2 for drives not to sleep, then that should be true regarless of the connection interface (eSata, FW, USB, TB, two dixie cups and a piece of string, etc).

Lastly, the statement that we "lose" performance by using afp versus smb2...if I understand what AE told you, AFP was the DEFAULT protocol for mounting external drives up until 10.9, so staying with AFP means that performance is NO WORSE than what we have been accustomed to for many, many years, presumably all the way back to 10.0. I would venture that the impact of drive specs, spin rate, cache size, seek time and so on, and the connection interface used (USB/FW) are FAR MORE impactful to performance than micro-second differences due to AFP versus SMB2.

What performance improvement is SMB2 doing for me if I have to switch back to using USB 2 instead of FW 800, so that my drives don't burn out and fail from spinning all day? Like many, I've invested thousands in drives and FW....I"m supposed to be appeased because SMB2 is 'faster', meanwhile my MTF (Mean Time to Failure) of my drives is dropping from year/months to weeks. Perhaps Apple Enterprise would like to share some actual benchmarks using same hardware, with the only difference being the file protocol? If Lcrooks can share how he set his system back to using AFP, I"m sure all of us here will run benchmarks and shove it right back into the face of Apple Enterprise.

Lcrooks my apologies, my frustration is with Apple, NOT you, please accept my apologies if my message sounds like a rant on you or a personal attack, it is not meant to be. I appreciate the time you spent working with Apple Enterprise. Could you PLEASE (yes, I am BEGGING) share the secret to reverting to AFP instead of SMB2 to mount drives? I will gladly live with the 'performance hit'.

There are several ways in terminal to achieve it. This line sets the system back to SMB (which is believed to be a more stable release), instead of SMB2:

echo "[default]" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf; echo "smb_neg=smb1_only" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf

To undo that change, enter

rm ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf

This line stops AFP:

sudo serveradmin stop afp

but I'm currently unsure if the equivalent line. using SMB2 on the end, would stop the SMB2 protocol from operating. I'm sure Lcrooks will come back with the answers.

mc_ringbearer - want to clarify some statements:

First:

Also, are we to understand then that Apple Enterprise is stating that SMB2 is now used as the default file protocol for ALL interfaces, meaning USB, Tbolt and Firewire?

Yes. The new default file protocol in Mavericks is SMB2 - not AFP - this website gives an overview of the change to SMB2 - http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/11/apple-shifts-from-afp-file-sharing-to- smb2-in-os-x-109-mavericks

Second:

Lastly, the statement that we "lose" performance by using afp versus smb2...if I understand what AE told you, AFP was the DEFAULT protocol for mounting external drives up until 10.9, so staying with AFP means that performance is NO WORSE than what we have been accustomed to for many, many years, presumably all the way back to 10.0.

The performance loss that I was describing is for use of the drive with a server or over wifi (ie as a network share). SMB2 offers markedly increased transfer speeds, caching/indexing of files, and improved security. This change to SMB2 is actually a considerable improvement of the new OS. As I stated in my first post, I run the Server version of Mavericks and my primary concern was that my drives were not entering standby mode when my server would sleep. This issue was solved my scheduling nightly shut downs. During normal operation, I do not want my drives to enter standby mode as this would obviously affect performance of my server when accessing files. Clearly, there are a fair amount of you that only use the drive directly with your client machine and never over wifi, therefore you will obviously not experience any performance loss in this scenerio.

Third:

Could you PLEASE (yes, I am BEGGING) share the secret to reverting to AFP instead of SMB2 to mount drives?

Using Server app, you are able to change the mounting characteristics of external disks, which is a key feature of all servers - for example Windows machines cannot access drive shares over AFP. Yesterday, when I was speaking with AE, we spent a lot of time trying to determine why the Thunderbolt drive would sleep, but the FireWire drive would not when we changed the energy setting to "Put Hard Disks to Sleep When Not In Use." Finally, when we switched the drives to AFP only (as this one of the new features that distinguishes 10.9 from 10.8 - and I never had ANY problems with drives entering standby mode when using 10.8) then both drives would enter standby mode. I called AE again this morning and asked them how to replicate this on a machine without server. After almost an hour, we got absolutely nowhere and the case was advanced to engineering - apparently this is not an easy setting to change in standalone 10.9. If they email me a solution I will post it here of course.

Fourth:

The only other solution offered from AE is to purchase a FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter, which should solve the problem at a cost of 30 bucks per drive (at least in the US - not sure if it's even more expensive in Europe?). Or, rollback to 10.8. Unfortunately this is all that was offered to me for someone running standalone 10.9 at the present time.

Finally - some of you seem to think I am defending Apple in their abondoment of FireWire support in Mavericks. This is not the case. I am only informing you of what AE told me - that this issue is NOT known to Apple, and because the Mac Pros (and ALL other new computers from Apple in every shape and size) only have USB3 and Thunderbolt, it is unlikely that this will be a significant issue for forthcoming Apple owners. It is possible that Apple will fix this problem in an upcoming update for Mavericks - is it also possible that Apple will start giving away free computers - I'm just giving my opinion on the reality of the situation.

The only other solution offered from AE is to purchase a FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter, which should solve the problem at a cost of 30 bucks per drive

I bought a FW to TB adapter for 29 euro-bucks here in Italy, but this doesn't solve at all...

Blaming Thunderbolt seems to be a red herring, since I see the same behavour on a 2008 iMac. With Snow Leopard: normal behaviour. With Mavericks: Firewire disks won't sleep.

Some signal on the Firewire port keeps the disk awake, and that signal is under control of the operating system.

I called AE again this morning and asked them how to replicate this on a machine without server. After almost an hour, we got absolutely nowhere and the case was advanced to engineering - apparently this is not an easy setting to change in standalone 10.9. If they email me a solution I will post it here of course.

And this is what almost everyone on this topic (and elsewhere) has been sayiong for some time. Mavericks has a bug - pure and simple. If I can accidentally 'fix' it, albeit temporarily, then there must be a fix available, and Apple's software and system people should find it.

This is so reminiscent of the time when an upgrade wrecked the FW 400 line. Apple kept curiously silent on that one, too, but the next OS update mysteriously rectified it.

I agree with the first part, the issue is clearly an OS bug introduced by Mavericks. But it seems unlikely to me that apple will fix a bug related to a hardware interface that they no longer implement in their new machines. Hence I think the context is different than the FW400 issue referenced above.

I would love to hear a way that I could switch to AFP from SMB2 because Thunderbolt adapters are no solution to me - I have no Thunderbolt interfaces on my 2009 imac or my four 1-3 yr old external drives. The only solutions that seem to exist for me are to downgrade the OS (more and more work the more I think about it) or to buy a USB hub and switch everything to USB.

Personally, a big take away for me is to NEVER use any hardware interface that apple offers if it doesn't have widespread adoption elsewhere. This reminds me of years ago having to essentially chuck out a perfectly good apple monitor because it used a proprietary interface to my old G4 tower. It would have made a great second monitor except it couldn't connect to anything else.....

I have a new Mini and both my FW800 and USB3 drives will not sleep when my Mac sleeps. If I shut down the FW shuts down but not the USB3 drive. Perhaps Apple has made the USB3 ports "hot" all the time to be used to charge phones, etc. I guess I can understand that philosophy but not the FW not being able to sleep.

OK I spoke too soon. I went back to see exactly what happens when I have both FW800 and USB3 external drives on. When my Mac Mini sleeps the USB3 drive sleeps but not the FW drive. When I shut my Mac down the USB3 drive stays on but the FW800 drive powers down. Not sure why this is