External harddrive won't shut down in Mavericks

Seem like this is a "feature" that Apple wants to keep. I have external firewire 800 LaCie and Seagate drives running under Yosemite. The Seagate drive behaves as advertised, the LaCie won't spin down unless unmounted, and won't stop spinning unless switched off. It does have a switch, however. The Seagate doesn't have a switch and doesn't seem to need it.

LaCie says it's Apple's fault. Apple says nothing.

I wonder if thunderbolt drives spin down properly?

Recently, I have opened a ticket with Apple's bug reporter (item # 21477641) as I experience the same issue with my external LaCie drives (D2 Quadra, FW800). As my drives have been formatted with OSX' encryption option, the following may not be applicable to your particular situation but I encourage you to give this approach a try and report your findings. Try the following:

• Connect an external drive to your mac and format it with encryption enabled. Create 1..n partitions. One partition will suffice.
• Disconnect and reconnect the drive (just to be sure that it really has been ejected from the system
• Open bash and run diskutil list. My drive has three partitions where all of them have been unlocked. Output from diskutil looks like this:

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *4.0 TB disk3

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk3s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage AAAAA 2.6 TB disk3s2

3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk3s3

4: Apple_CoreStorage BBBBB 1.1 TB disk3s4

5: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk3s5

6: Apple_CoreStorage CCCCC 279.2 GB disk3s6

7: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk3s7

/dev/disk4 (external, virtual):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS AAAAA +278.8 GB disk4

Logical Volume on disk3s6

40342379-A668-49B9-9F08-1DB51DD274CD

Unlocked Encrypted

/dev/disk5 (external, virtual):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS BBBBB +1.1 TB disk5

Logical Volume on disk3s4

4435349A-BF4F-4F66-AB54-47222DFC684F

Unlocked Encrypted

/dev/disk6 (external, virtual):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS CCCCCC +2.6 TB disk6

Logical Volume on disk3s2

DE421438-524E-4C12-9FFE-E8B354397E56

Unlocked Encrypted

Now eject all partitions via Finder. The drive will not spin down but it is continuously spinning. Run diskutil list again. It will tell you that all partitions have been ejected. Well, almost all of our partitions have been ejected.

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *4.0 TB disk3

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk3s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage AAAAA 2.6 TB disk3s2

3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk3s3

4: Apple_CoreStorage BBBBB 1.1 TB disk3s4

5: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk3s5

6: Apple_CoreStorage CCCCC 279.2 GB disk3s6

7: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk3s7

/dev/disk4 (external, virtual):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS AAAAA +278.8 GB disk4

Logical Volume AAAAA on disk3s6

40342379-A668-49B9-9F08-1DB51DD274CD

Locked Encrypted

/dev/disk5 (external, virtual):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS BBBBB +1.1 TB disk5

Logical Volume BBBBB on disk3s4

4435349A-BF4F-4F66-AB54-47222DFC684F

Locked Encrypted

/dev/disk6 (external, virtual):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS CCCCC +2.6 TB disk6

Logical Volume CCCCC on disk3s2

DE421438-524E-4C12-9FFE-E8B354397E56

Locked Encrypted

Offline

Logical Volume AAAAA on disk3s2

40342379-A668-49B9-9F08-1DB51DD274CD

Locked Encrypted

Offline

Logical Volume BBBBB on disk3s6

4435349A-BF4F-4F66-AB54-47222DFC684F

Locked Encrypted

Offline

Logical Volume CCCCC on disk3s4

DE421438-524E-4C12-9FFE-E8B354397E56

Locked Encrypted

Now it's another time for diskutil. Run diskutil eject and eject any of the partitions between /dev/disk3s2 and /dev/disk3s7. As a result, your drive will spin down.

mac:~ jsl$ diskutil eject /dev/disk3s2

Disk /dev/disk3s2 ejected

mac:~ jsl$

(and yes, you can even eject the "Boot OS X" partitions - scary. That particular hard drive has no bootable partition installed btw).

Conclusion: There is a 'workaround' - at least for encrypted external drives. Your miles may vary for non-encrypted external.

Side notes:

• The issue has not been fixed with the latest El Capitan beta. Note that prior to El Capitan, there was a "GUI workaround":
  • enable debug mode for Disk Utility
  • enable 'show all drives' option
  • Once all encrypted partitions have been ejected via Finder, eject the "Boot OS X partition" via Disk Utility.
• As Apple has seriously tampered with Disk Utility's advanced functions, that GUI feature is now gone and you need to use the command line approach.
• The issue did not occur with Snow Leopard - my old MBP is happy to trigger 'spindown' ejects whenever I eject the drives.
• My MacMini and newer MPB are both running Yosemite and El Capitan - both machines show the same symptoms.

Last but not least: this approach will not help you with the energy saver spindown issue as the drive keeps spinning and spinning and spinning .... So far, I have found no workaround for that issue.

The bug reporter ticket is still pending review.

Hope this helps!

History with Apple dictates that when they remove some technology from their products such as FW they will no longer spend resources doing anything with it. USB3 and beyond is now the technology. They are spending all their resources developing the next OS which they come out with yearly.

They are fully aware of the issue since I reported this well over a year ago and had dealing with what they call upper level support.

This is not new to them no matter how they react to your situation, they know it and are not going to fix it. I think they see the end of FW and that means less and less people with this issue...Problem solved.

Brief but unsatisfying update: Last night, Apple have classified my bug report as a duplicate of bug #15637637. That ticket's status is listed as "open" so they still may work on the underlying issue.

No addition to the bug's root cause, time-to-fix etc was provided.

I am also having the problem. I have a Thunderbolt adapter to FW800 going to an external drive that has 2 partitions on it. No matter if they are unmounted, mounted, or any setting done both from the Preference Pane or command line... they never spin down.

They are used strictly for backup, so I'm much like them to spin up only when Chronosync begins the backup cycle each night.

I'm running El Capitan 10.11.1.

Even under the latest version of El Capitan, my OWC Mercury Elite Pro enclosure (purchased recently in Dec. 2015) with 1TB HDD inside will not sleep/spin-down when I put my iMac11,1 to sleep. It's connected to the Mac via FW800. Is there no third party app or trick to force external FW800 drives to spin-down automatically when the Mac sleeps? (I am aware of "Jettison" from St. Clair, but that ejects rather than sleeps the drive.)

Here's what OWC told me today about the failure to sleep when external drives use FireWire, and I quote:

"This is a known issue with both the Oxford 944 and JMicron 355 chipset in 10.9 or later. Unfortunately, we have not received a fix for the issue from Oxford or JMicron. We've also submitted a bug report to Apple and have not heard back from them either."

My Lacie 3TB Porche external drive will not stop spinning when connected to my Mac Air 2008 via USB 3. Crazy! I do not have time to fiddle with such nonsense. Do I need to get a new drive that will act normally? what one?

Bob

Thank you for posting this! This does the trick. Wonder why the DistUtility eject or dragging to the trashcan options haven't worked since Mavericks, but should be able to place a script on my desktop that will do the 'diskutil eject /dev/disk3' just nicely... Thanks again.