Lacie disk on FW not sleeping after installing Mavericks

Thunderbolt drives seem to be suffering from the same sleep issue (at least mine are)

I'm going to assume Apple knows about this and is working on some fix, they can't have thunderbolt drives not sleeping when the new mac pros ship out.

mr.patio wrote:

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.

Interestingly, at the time there were people saying that Apple was no longer supporting FW 400, which was why that bug wasn't going to be fixed. It was fixed, however; in the subsequent OS.

RocaBruja wrote:

Thunderbolt drives seem to be suffering from the same sleep issue (at least mine are)

I'm going to assume Apple knows about this and is working on some fix, they can't have thunderbolt drives not sleeping when the new mac pros ship out.

LaCie told me before Christmas that Apple was aware of the bug. They didn't fixed it in OS 9.1See the other thread at:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5486167?answerId=24484915022#24484915022&ac_cid=tw123456#24484915

There is doubt whether Apple will fix this bug, because it is said that they are phasing out Firewire and want to get rid of it without notice. Change is inevitable, but this is a disgraceful way to behave, but Apple have always been dictatorial.

SteveKir wrote:

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.

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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.

I installed Mavericks (10.9.1) on my iMac (2011) on Saturday morning, with my Time Machine external Firewire drive connected by USB. After my iMac has been on all day every day and sleeping many times, the drive has slept (after a 10 secs. wait) every time the iMac has slept. Despite being on (the slower) USB connection I have not noticed any slowing of the Mac when TM saves every 2 hours—I don't notice backing up.

My problem has been solved! As mentioned in the quotation above this message, this solution might not work for someone needing frequent access to a Firewire drive, and at high speed. But I am happy (except for criticising Apple for not fixing this bug, and deciding in cold blood not to, without notice.)

What happens when you shut down your Mac with the USB TM. Does it shut down? Mine keeps spinning when hooked to USB3 port.

I have USB 2, not 3.

I have just done a test. I shut down the Mac. The drive continued to spin (I gave it 5 minutes) then I switched it off. After about a minute I switched it on again. It spun up. I restarted the Mac and the TM drive mounted itself. I could access it.

However, not spinning down on shutdown would not affect me because I shut down the computer only about once a week or once every two weeks.

Not spinning down after a shutdown is unusual. Another oddity of Mavericks‚—perhaps Apple are ditching USB 2 as well as Firewire, which would require people to re-equip their USB 2 drives, without notice, when OS 10.10 arrives! We must look out for that, although Apple, as usual, would be silent. I begin to wonder whether Apple pay any attention to the customer experience when discussing upgrades at their meetings.

SteveKir: To close the loop I rebooted on my external ML drive 10.8.5 and found the same issue. My USB3 drive will not power down when my Mac powers down. It will sleep OK when my Mac sleeps. So it appears this is carryover from ML. I never really did a good A-B-A check before.

The reverse bug...

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

Note that manufacturers of disk enclosures use proprietary software to adjust their disk timers, often Windows-only.

How to adjust drive sleep time on a Seagate Backup Plus drive

What should I do if my Western Digital Green Power Disk has a dramatic high Load/Unload Cycle Count?

I have the same problem with three inXtron SK-3500 and one SK-2500 attached via Firewire 800. If I attach them via USB 2 to my iMac 2007 they are spinning down.

Also with Mountain Lion without changing anything in hardware, they are spinning down when they are attached via Firewire 800.

Very sad! :-(

I filed a bug report to Apple.

My experience - with external OWC Mercury Elite Pro drives attached to MacMini running 10.9.1:

When connecting via FW800, the drives do not spin down when not in use, when the pc goes to sleep, or when the volume is unmounted. It DOES spin down if the pc is shut down.

Adding a Thunderbolt to FW adaptor (as someone suggested) helps a bit: the drives will spin down when the pc is asleep. They still don't spn down if the drives are not in use or when they are unmounted.

Switching to USB2 (my system doesn't havge USB3), solves most issues. The drives spin down when not in use, when pc is asleep, and when drives are unmounted. Wierdly, they do not spin down if the computer is shut down.

One of the external drives contains a WD Green drive, which has even stranger behavior (worked as expected prior to Mavericks). The Thunderbolt to FW adaptor has NO EFFECT. The drive will not spin down when not in use (even though it is designed to do so independent of the device it is attached to). It doesn't spin down when pc is asleep or when drive is unmounted. It DOES spin down when PC is shut down.

With a connection via USB2, it behaves just like the other drive.

kdeemer: I concur. Have the exact same experience as you do.

To all those users having the issue with your external drives not spinning down in sleep mode. And to any and all MAC gurus. This is my story. Maybe someone out there will have an "Ah! Hah!" moment and come up with a permanent solution.

I have two external HDD. A 500mb Lacie I use for Time Machine. It has FW800, FW400 and USB2 inputs. My other drive is a 1TB Maxtor One Touch. It has FW400 and USB2 inputs. Before Jan 2013 I had an older Intel 2 duo core iMac. I had my external drives daisy chaing via the FW400 ports. No problems with them spinning down in sleep mode.

In Jan of 2013 I purchased a new iMac intel core 5. Because there was no FW ports, I ended up using two of the USB ports. One for each of the drives. Again no problems with them spinning down in sleep mode. That is until I upgrade to Mavericks. I can't remember exactly what I did to get the external drives to spin down in sleep mode. May have been just disabling the "Enable Power Nap" option. Anyway, they were operating as expected.

This past Christmas "Santa" aka my children, gave me a Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter. So I connected my Lacie via FW800 and daisy chained my Maxtor via the FW400. Guess what happened next.... When putting the iMac to sleep, the Lacie did not spin down, but my Maxtor did?!?!

After going through all these posts and trying different things nothing seemed to work. The only solution seemed to be reverting back to USB. This is where I find it gets even more puzzling. Instead of removing the FW800 input fromt the Thunderbolt adapter, I just add the USB cable from the iMac to the Lacie. Now the Lacie doesn't pop up as drive on my desk top, but the Maxtor does. The Lacie is mounted because it is in the finder window and still does its backups. And behold... when I put my iMac to sleep, both drives spin down...........

So maybe, this issue is not a software bug after all. Maybe its the Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter. Maybe they the signal to the external HDD to spin down is FW400 signal instead of FW800. Maybe Apple should read this and fix it.

Happy New Year Everyone!!

In some other discussions it was stated that both FW and TB ports have this non sleeping issue. This all started with Mavericks so I'm sure it is OS related.

Hello!

I filed a bug report at bugreporter.apple.com and the answer from Apple is that this bugreport is a duplicate. So I think Apple is aware of the bug in Mavericks.

But if something will be changed is the question.

Maybe in 10.10 there will be feature 196 that is called: "External drives on Firewire are now going to sleep".

To Cornel and Lcrooks:

Lcrooks had mentioned that in his conversations with Apple, it was suggested that the culprit is Mavericks new support for SMB2 that was causing this problem, and that it was possible to force MAvericks to revert back to SMB as the default. However, Lcrooks also mentioned that in his talk with Apple, that this was only possible on the Server version and they were unable to figure out a way to do this on the client version.

Subsequentlyl, Cornel posted Terminal commands to use to force Mavericks to use the older SMB protocol instead of SMB2

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

echo "smb_neg=smb1_only" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf

I came across this ZDNet article about similar issues with SMB2 in Mavericks, which also included the same command tips, as well as tips to revert to an even older protocal called CIFS

http://www.zdnet.com/mavericks-smb2-problem-and-fixes-7000022519/

Apparently these Terminal echo commands can be used on the client version. What is unclear to me from either of you gentlemen, and I apologize in advance if I'm just missing something, is the following:

IF you execute the echo command to create a new nsmb.conf file, forcing Mavericks to use SMB instead of SMB2, does it solve the problem of Firewire connected drive not sleeping or spinning down?

I tried the commands, in the client version of 10.9.1, I don't see a difference (External mounted firewire drives still don't spin down or sleep), but maybe I'm missing something? the comments from you two gentlemen seemed to suggest that switching back to SMB solved the problem.

Please clarify if you would.

Thanks,

Michael