External harddrive won't shut down in Mavericks

I've found a solution that works with my setup. Mac Mini 2.53GZ with 3 WD external My Book Studio drives(twin drive versions) and the latest WD drive manager. Time Machine drive formatted as Raid 1 connected via USB 2.0. The other two drives formatted as Raid 1 and Raid 0 connected via FW800. Time machine drive sleeps immediately if it's not doing a backup when the computer is put to sleep. The two FW800 drives sleep within about 10 minutes after either putting the computer to sleep or when not being accessed for 10 minutes.

I now suspect the sleep problem has something to do with Time Machine access when using FW800. Come on Apple, this doesn't seem like a big problem to fix.

Hope this works for the rest of you. Happy Holidays

Nope, 10.9.1 didn't fix this for me. I am running a iMac 24 circa 2007 model with time machine running on an external Seagate 1.5tb drive on usb. No FW800 on this machine. The drive will not sleep, ever.

I will try turning Time Machine off and see if there is any difference. Stay tuned...

Turning TimeMachine on or off... doesnt matter. Still will not sleep.

Internal second HDD in MBP does not stop spinning.

I unmounted the two volumes of the disk and it still spins. I'm puzzled.

I can damage the HDD, is noisy and drains the battery.

Was not a problem with M. Lion.

Unmounting worked for the 1st time, but somehow never again.

Apple!!!? what a Vista job!

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

See the posts on this thread. No solution.

see also:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5479044?start=30&tstart=0

Has anyone heard anything new on this? I'm still having to manually "un-mount" my hdd's. Pain in the ***. Especially since I travel a lot with my Macbook and used to access info on the drives from the road. Now I have to take them with me everywhere. :-(

Thanks

I have heard nothing. Apple have started posting to a few threads on other topics, indicated by the Apple logo at the left of the window of their message, but not a peep from Apple on this bug.

Same here, when putting the iMac to sleep the external firewire HD keeps spinning. Manually ejecting/unmounting it too: although dissapearing from the desktop it keeps spinning.

Only shutting the mac down completely will finally spin down the drive....

Please Apple, fix this and do something about quality control in general as there are too many glitches and mistakes popping up (f.e. the huge black screen sleep mishap with macbook Airs as well...). In all the former years the general Apple users never bumped into these kinds of rudimentary failures and/or at this scale.

I'm fearing the days of Apple=Quality is coming to an end!

Sadly, I agree.

I had exactly the same problem with Freecom external drives. Today, I needed to get some library files from a disc with Mountain Lion on, so I used the "Start Up" disc option in Sys prefs (I have a Mac pro with 4 x 2TB drives and 2 x external 3TB drives as media servers). Curiously, since restarting in Mavericks the sleep issue has disappeared. The drives go to sleep perfectly after just a few minutes.

As far as I know, apart from transferring some Fetch prefs files, I changed nothing.

Thanks. My Sys. Prefs. has always been set to startup the computer (an iMac) from the internal hard drive (where my OS is). I have reset it to that and will see what happens, but I am doubtful that it could cure my problem of external Firewire HDs not sleeping.

My iMac has got several glitches, about 4 at any one time, for the last 2 1/2 years. They change now and again, one disappearing for no apparent reason, to be replaced by a different one for no apparent reason.

Over here

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5479044?start=75&tstart=0

there's a possible explanation, but it seems to be wrong. Someone is saying that it's all because Mavericks has started using the Windows file sharing protocol - smb2 instead of AFP. However, they then went on to state that simply setting AFP as the default would solve the problem, which it doesn’t. So there's clearly something more amiss.

I also have two hard drives connected, with the second one being daisy-chained through the first drive via Firewire. Interstingly the second one spins down as usual, only the drive directly connected to the iMac has the problem discussed here.

In order to identify Mavericks as the problem, you need to see if all external hard drives hooked up to the computer have this problem. Also check to see if the hard drive spins down when powered up but not connected to the computer.

I have a 3TB OWC that has this problem, and its spins when powered up even when not connected to the computer. My other OWC hard drives (albeit not the exact same model) do not have this problem. I'm working to trying to fix it with Disk utility now.