External harddrive won't shut down in Mavericks

OzziesMAC wrote:

Does Thunderbolt use the same Oxford Bridge?

In this context, "Oxford Bridge" refers to a micro-controller chip made by Oxford Semiconductors used by some vendors of external drives to "bridge" the internal ATA/SATA interface of the raw drive to an external Firewire or USB port (or both). It lives in the HD case, & together with other circuitry designed by the vendor it controls both data flow between the host computer & the HD and ancillary functions like power management.

The chip itself is fully compatible with all published USB & Firewire standards; however, for various reasons different vendors sometimes add proprietary features, particularly for power management, that are not standardized & have been know to cause problems with some Mac models running some versions of OS X.

While Oxford Semiconductor may make a Thunderbolt to Firewire bridge chip, it would not be the same type as used in external HD's for bridging between ATA/SATA & USB or Firewire interfaces.

Thanks RC-R

My issues is not Thunderbolt to Firewire. My Thunderbolt external drive connected to the Thunderbolt port on the iMac will also not go to sleep or spin down for inactivity. I thought it would only affect FW and USB connections.

My USB connections work properly in spinning down the external drives after 10 minutes of inactivity but the FW and Thunderbolt drives do not do this.

Has anyone installed the new Yosemite public beta, and see if it makes a difference?

I'm taking delivery of a new iMac next week, I currently have the issue of a LaCie Minimus 2TB extHD never sleeping while connected to my late 2008 MacBook Pro with USB 2/3. There really seems to be no fix for this problem, but if it continues with my new machine, I will be making use of Apple Support, for the entire year long warranty period if necessary, to find a solution. I will report back here to let you all know how I get on.

Thanks, jump on it right away.

My best guess is they will try some trouble shooting with you first pretending like they never heard of the problem.

Then they will ask to run a program on your computer that will send them data on the issue and then they will get back to you.

Then they will bump you up to a higher level of support which will ask you to try a few more things that won't work so they promise to get back to you.

These delays will continue till either you give up or they tell you they have no fix for it.

Good Luck

I have several USB3 drives that sleep with no issues. My guess is that you may have some setting or software preventing this. I know FW drives do not sleep but that is another issue.

The only lead I have to go on is the fact that when I close iTunes (the library is stored on the problem drive) the drive (eventually) stops its activity, which looks like it is reading and writing thousands of different files simultaneously. To check once more that this is not just iTunes doing something to the media files (music, TV Shows, Movies etc) I left it running over night, a total of about 10 hours, and in the morning it was still chattering away. It could be a problem with iTunes I guess.. Anyone know how to revert to iTunes 9?

I do not believe going back to an earlier version of iTunes is the answer. Do you have any other drive you could check to see if it sleeps?

Expect most of them not to work the way it used to after the Mavericks update.

Apple calls this a "New Feature" and it will be that way until FireWire is phased out.

I have 4 external drives with the same issue.

"Jettison" by St. Clare Software was recommended in another thread to cure the "feature". St. Clare told me that it would work in iMacs and laptops under Mavericks, and will work under Yosemite when they produce an upgrade, expecter soon:

http://www.stclairsoft.com/Jettison/index.html

$4.99

"Jettison" by St. Clare Software does not work they way native Mountan Lion ran it.

I have a Mac Mini that is never turned off, attached to it are 3 firewire external drives

that are daisy chained. When Mac Mini went to sleep so did all three drives. When the

Mac MIni was awakened by the network and a drive needed to be accessed, the drive

would then automatically spin back up.

After the so call upgrade to Mavericks they added a "New Feature" that leaves all Firewire

external drives spinning even if the Mac Mini went to sleep and even if you have it checked marked

to go to sleep in energy saver preferences.

"Jettison"will eject your drive when Mac Mini goes to sleep but it will not re-connect it it when the

Mac Mini is awakened by the network. So when I access my mac mini at home from the road (i.e. Business Trip)

The external drives do not pop up because "Jettison"ejected them.

I've recently come across this problem. I had a WD MyBook Studio II 6TB that was working fine on Mavericks using FW800. I then replaced it with a LaCie 4Big Quadra v3 12TB RAID which wouldn't sleep on FW800, but would on USB2.

Now that I've upgraded to Yosemite, it won't sleep on either FW800 or USB2. And I just noticed more weirdness: When using the drive's other FW800 port it constantly goes to sleep and wakes up, regardless of what the Mac is doing.

Johnny Appleseed wrote:

I've recently come across this problem. I had a WD MyBook Studio II 6TB that was working fine on Mavericks using FW800. I then replaced it with a LaCie 4Big Quadra v3 12TB RAID which wouldn't sleep on FW800, but would on USB2.

Now that I've upgraded to Yosemite, it won't sleep on either FW800 or USB2. And I just noticed more weirdness: When using the drive's other FW800 port it constantly goes to sleep and wakes up, regardless of what the Mac is doing.

This is really serious. If Yosemite won't sleep both Firewire and USB2 drives, I will have to stick with Mavericks because my 2011 iMac (only 3 years old!) does not have USB3. My first step will be a test installation of Yosemite. Let's see what others find.

But am I right in assuming that my iMac does not have USB3? System Report shows (as much as I can copy in one clip):

USB Hi-Speed Bus:

Host Controller Locati

PCI Device ID: 0x1c2d

PCI Revision ID: 0x0005

PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086

Bus Number: 0xfa

USB Hi-Speed Bus:

PCI Revision ID: 0x0005

PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086

Bus Number: 0xfa

Affirmative, I have a 2011 iMac and no USB3. USB3 devices are still backwards-compatible with USB2 slots, but some are flakier than others (e.g. I had a bad experience with a Seagate drive).

Might also be worth playing around with external USB and/or Firewire hubs to address the sleep issue, as some have reported success with different plugs/sockets. It seems to be dependent on whether there's power to the slot and how different chipsets respond to it...