External harddrive won't shut down in Mavericks

Okay, have established the drive will sleep when the computer sleeps and wake when the computer wakes.

Still not ideal - I'd rather the HD only wake when it's needed - but I guess it's better than it running 24/7.

Hello!

I sent my third bug report regarding this problem to Apple via bugreport.apple.com. The first two are only duplicates to closed bugreports. :-(

Maybe I get another reaction this time.

And maybe some people writing in this thread also send a bugreport to Apple. Maybe they react some time.

I have personally sent more bug reports on his than I can count, at least 2 from each of my laptops and macs.

They are fully aware of it this is ancient news, they do not consider it a bug but call it a feature and there is no

fix coming.

I just wasted a good hour or so of my working day on the phone to Apple trying to get some answers about this out of them. No luck.

I was hoping updating to Yosemite might mean I no longer had to use Disk Utility to mount and unmount my otherwise constantly spinning external drives. Nothing has changed with Yosemite. Same story. No one I talked to at Apple had a clue what I was talking about. Ridiculous. It's a pain in the backside.

Anyone here got any further with this or are we resigned to using Disk Utility and manually plugging/unplugging leads for the rest of eternity?

I spent several months off and on with this issue and Apple. My Mac Mini is still under warranty so I bugged them good about it.

The bottom line is there is nor will there be a fix for this FireWire issue. They actually consider this a feature now and normal behavior

for FireWire external drives from Mavericks on up. If I prefer the old way I can go back to my original operating system Mountain Lion.

You can go raise your blood pressure with Apple, or get a USB external drive but the FireWire external drives not spinning down is

here to stay until FireWire officially stops being supported.

They used to have a problem with external drives ejecting when they went to sleep, they fixed that by not letting it spin down and closed the book for good on FireWire external drives.

Oliver Matuschin wrote:

What exactly is the "feature" part of this problem? I cannot think of any use for a harddrive which never spins down while the computer itself is sleeping.

OzziesMAC has the answer - Apple did it because many manufacturers' drives were failing to stay mounted when spinning down, with the spontaneous ejects resulting in data loss. Apple's answer (like it or not) is to never have external firewire drives spin down.

However, with Yosemite, thinks got worse. Now my Macs wake up from sleep every two hours, which also starts up the external harddrive. Which means that my harddrive spins up every two hours 24/7 and then spins down again after the timeout period of about 10 minutes.

I am using Sleepwatcher to deal with both problems. Whenever I sleep my Mac, Sleepwatcher automatically ejects all of my firewire drives (which does make them spin down) and re-mounts them upon wake. Upon sleep, I have Sleepwatcher also configured to temporarily disable the process that is responsible for waking my Mac up every two hours, so it too stays asleep. The process is re-enabled upon wake.

No more insomniac Mac or firewire drives - everything running the 10.8 and earlier way for me. 🙂

Oliver Matuschin wrote:

I got around this issue by attaching my Firewire drive to a Firewire hub,

Can you tell us what type of Hub you are using? Is it self powered or powered by Firewire?

Thank you!

Oliver Matuschin wrote:

Now my Macs wake up from sleep every two hours, which also starts up the external harddrive.

Yes, I have it also. And if there is an Apple TV in the same Network, the Mac mini will wake up from sleep, stay a little bit awake, sleeps, wake up from sleep, stay a little bit awake, sleeps, wake up from sleep...

But that is part of another story. I filed a bugreport for this but nothing happened until now.

Oliver Matuschin wrote:

It's not a plain Hub, it's built in in an external Harddrive case:

http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B005KIQOOI

So I have the following setup: iMac > Macpower inXtron over FireWire 800 > WD MyBook over FireWire 800

I don't know whether the harddrive in the inXtron case goes to sleep because it is a SSD. But I doubt it.

Oh, I own the same Harddrive case (it seems you are also from Germany) and a few more SK-3500 for my big drives. And your drives are going to sleep after this drive. Interesting! I will try it.

Thank you!

Oliver Matuschin wrote:

So after I put my iMac to sleep it takes about 10 minutes, and then the MyBook HD also falls asleep.

Ok. My SK-3500 Harddrive case doesn't has such a timer. :-( So it will not work.

So I think I will let my iMac (2007) retire and will install Windows there because my wife needs it (and Apple don't need windows on an iMac !-)). Then I will use my Mac mini as my main machine and the SK-3500 cases are attached via USB 3.

It will only cost me a monitor (surely not from Apple!) for the mini.

Wouldn't it be possible to exchange the firewire kexts in Yosemite with the ones from Mountain Lion to get the old behaviour back? Does anyone knows the deeper structure?

.......

So, in my opinion, this is not a "feature" nor a "bugfix" but a simple FAIL. What kind of problem solution is this? They are unable to fix the issue so they simply remove the complete functionality? What will happen next... will they also drop WiFi support in the next major OS X release because it never worked flawlessly for all customers? This is just plain stupid. I never had an issue with any Firewire harddrive since OS X 10.0, and I had a lot of them.

......

Yes, it's almost always possible to find a way to circumvent drawbacks or failures of the OS. But I don't buy Macs because I want to spend my spare time tinkering around with the OS to get it working the way it should be. I buy Macs because they should work out of the box. And it was this way until Mavericks. Since Mavericks, a lot of cool features have vanished or have been destroyed which used to work flawlessly in earlier OS X versions.

Exactly! I used to recommend macs to friends but not any more. This sort of stupid neglectful behaviour is what we all expect of politicians but not commercial organisations. The fact that Apple has not acknowledged nor explained nor fixed this is a sign of the way things are since Steve Jobs died. What next? USB dropped requiring people to buy new peripherals and buy a new Mac. And again, with not a cheep from Apple. And there is the 2 /12 year old frequent mouse disconnection, cursor disappearing problem complained about by so many on this forum, again no recognition from Apple let alone a cure for this hugely disruptive fault. Arrogance is the word. What a pity.