External harddrive won't shut down in Mavericks

I asked Lacie. They said to contact Apple. Surprised?

My Seagate 2 TB drive, with no on/off switch, works fine. So, even though the trouble started with Mavericks, my Seagate drive still works properly. I think Apple has the responsibility to maintain compatability with ALL compnents that meet specifications.

I have two MacAlly FW800 enclosures that won't sleep unless I eject them. As an experiment I issued the following command to terminal

fs_usage | grep Clone

My two externals are named Clone A and Clone B. Eventhough I was not touching the drives, Mavericks was issuing IO commands to them every minute or so with the longest period 3 mins. Just opening system preferences would send a IO command to all connected drives.

I contacted Freecom (I have the same issue on a 3TB external drive) and they'd had no reports of the problem. However, in the light of what I told them they've taken it up with Apple. No response as yet.

The annoying thing is previously it just worked. No accessing the External HD for a while meant it happily spun down. Now it doesn't do it under Mavericks, whereas it still does it under Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard. It's probably just one line of code, but it took them a while to rectify the unbelievably sloppy security bug found in the https protocols recently, and that was a single line.

There have been lots of reports over the past few years of external disks spontaneously ejecting themselves when spinning down and/or when the Mac is put to sleep. There have been several monster threads right here on these forums about that. It's definitely a problem for many people.

This thread in particular references somebody from OWC stating that external drives with Oxford 944SE chipsets are particularly vulnerable to spontaneous ejecting with sleeping and waking (i.e. spinning down.)

Having such external drives never spin down would be one way of tackling that problem. Hmmm....

I have a WD portable external. It was working fine until I encrypted it to use with time machine back ups. Now it won't spin down on ejecting.

I think it has something to do with how disk utility converted the partition or is handling external hard drive.

Because it is now being shown as one of the "internal" drives in disk utility instead of being shown as an external. May be that's why it is not spinning down on ejecting?

After upgrading to 10.9.2 my drives would sleep as they should, that is until I restarted the computer a few days later and the sleep problem returned. Knowing that it was possible for the drives to sleep normally, I spent many hours trying different scenarios of ejecting and mounting drives in order to get them to act normally. Eventually I found a procedure that works. So here's what works for me.

Making sure that no application is using the drive(s), I press the power button on each drive which ejects and shuts them down. I then put the computer to sleep. With the computer still sleeping I power up the drives and wait until they sleep, typically after 10 minutes. I'll then wake the computer at which point the drives automatically wake up and mount. From that point on both drives sleep either when not used for 10 minutes or 10 minutes after the computer is put to sleep. Sometimes I'll have to repeat the procedure doing each drive individually for it to work. Unfortunately, this has to be repeated every time the computer is restarted which for me is not very often.

Note that I have a separate WD drive connected via USB that is used by Time Machine. I've always suspected that TM was part of the problem. As we all now know, USB connected drives sleep noramlly. I also do my backups manually rather than letting TM automatically perform them. At some point I'll try daisy chaining all drives together using FW800 and engage automatic backups to see what happens. For right now though I'm going to well enough alone.

I doubt if this will work for everyone but I thought I'd share it. Perhaps someone with more computer knowledge can explain why this works.

2009 Mac Mini using 2 WD FW800 My Book Studio II. One's formatted Raid 0, the other Raid 1 using WD drive manager.

Sounds like its easier just to go back to Mountain Lion.

Also it's amazing that you think that this is not going to get fixed. I find it hard to beleive that somebody is not telling the code writers to correct the issue or is it that they can't find the bug so they are not going to use more resorces to correct it?

I did go back to ML and I'm a happy camper since then. Had to many issues regarding Macericks. Mainly concerning peripheral devices that no longer worked as supposed.

Issues with Mavericks External drives!

I have a problem that averytime I want to open a file with the contextual menu 'open with Photoshop' for example, it takes a very long time before showing the menu and my 3 external drives are starting up first...

When they are 'active'' the menu is showing - but it frustrates my workflow 600%

I have the feeling all those errors arerelated to the buggy File system on Mavericks.

I have problems moving files to the trash.

One time it moves another time it takes ages to just move a small file to the trash.

I have run several tries to repair permissions, reinstalled Mavericks and all other things I could think of.

Why is Apple releasing such a buggy OS?

And **** give us back the Label option!!!

Same scenario here. Several FW800 drives (different brands). Most of the drives use Filevault2 and have 1..n partitions. Not running any drive manufacturer's addon malware on my computer.

By accident, I just came across a "solution" that allows me to unmount AND spindown my external FW800 drives (most of them LaCie D2 Quadra, some WD drives) - without having to shut down my computer (yay, finally!).

Case scenario:

- FW800 hard drive with three partitions; hard drive uses Filevault2

- MacMini Late 2012, running 10.9.2

• Use Finder or Disk Utility to eject all of your drive's partitions. Eject process works as usual, but the drive still keeps spinning and won't spin down
• Open Disk Utility and examine the drive's partitions. All three partitions are visible and according to Disk Utility, no part of the drive still seems to be online (everything is greyed out) ... which is not really the case.
• Click on any of that drive's "Boot OS X" partitions. Despite being greyed out, that particular partition is still online (Eject button in Disk Utility is enabled). Eject that partition. Your drive will now spin down.

That approach works for all of my external FW drives - your miles may vary.

Best,

Joerg

Thats not the problem Joerg. 10.9.2 fixed the ejection problem. The problem is that the external drives on FW and Thunderbolt do not spin down when computer goes to sleep. It has been that way since Mavericks launched.

I keep hoping it will be fixed everytime update comes but still waiting.

10.9.3 update......external FW hard drives spin down on computer sleep but STILL DON"T SPIN DOWN when inactive, even when "Put disks to sleep when possible" is selected 😢

I just asked OWC about the issue and they replied:

Thank you for the email. OWC is very sorry for the issues you are having and any inconvenience it has caused
The Thunderbolt port and adapter do not send the signals for the drive to spin down as the Firewire port did

I hate the answer, but it seems to be the definitive one.

You must be lucky. Updated to 10.9.3 and my FW800 drive still does not spin down when Mac sleeps or spins down even if "put HDD to sleep" is checked. Same old issue.