External harddrive won't shut down in Mavericks

its spins when powered up even when not connected to the computer.

On some drives there are invisible softwares to prepare the drive to be as fast as possible when addressed. These softwares are called controlers by some.

In Disk Utility erase/format, using the correct format, probably solves this.

Backup what yo do not want to loose before.

In order to identify Mavericks as the problem,

I've had this external drive on this same iMac since 2007, leopard, snow leopard, lion, Mountain lion. But now with Mavericks it is not sleeping. That tells me it's a Mavericks problem. Can I go back to a previous OSX to prove this?

I believe this post is for those who have ruled out HDD as the problem already. Hardware has been unchanged in most of the cases.

Any solutions?

I have the same issue after Mavericks. I went back to see exactly what happens when I have both FW800 and USB3 external drives on. When my Mac Mini sleeps the USB3 drive sleeps but not the FW drive. When I shut my Mac down the USB3 drive stays on but the FW800 drive powers down. Not sure why this is. I'm using Seagate and Toshiba drives. I swapped drives and the same thing so it is not drive related.

Sand the problem to Apple:

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

Already did weeks ago.

See my post, just made, at:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5479044?answerId=24486130022#24486130022&ac_cid=tw123456#24486130

My problem has been solved. It might help others.

Hi,

I was having the same problem, it does this when you have your Ext. HDD encrypted.

My Experience :

I encrypted my HDD then afterwards i right clicked on the drive and clicked on eject but it was still spinning

so I left it as it is for 2Mins (could take 5 Mins too) and it stopped spinning.

If your hdd behavoiur doesnt change then you should, have a word with MAC Tech Guys

May be just give it bit time and see.

MBP 13 i5 Maverick Updated version 26/1/14

🙂

My Mac Mini has 2 G-Drives daisy chained via Firewire with the same issue. Drives no longer go to sleep.

I also noticed that even if I eject it from the Mac Mini it show they are disconnected in Finder but the keep spinning.

If I shut down the Mac Mini the external drives then spin down. This is causing them to get very hot. I see this has been an on going issue in Mavericks and would love to know if anybody has actually received any responses from Apple on this issue.

Hi ozzie,

Try un mounting or ejecting from disk utility

In the spotlight type in Disk utility select ur hdd from the left bar and click unmount and leave it for 2 mins, hope it will stopped spinning :) best of luck

Thanks Areeb2, I ejected the drives via Disk Utilities as suggested but that made no difference. The drives shows ejected in Finder but the external drives continue to spin. I did run "Console" from the utilities and it did find an error after I ejected the drive but I do not know hot to interpret the error.

Error Found:

I ran Console (Applications > Utilities > Console) then ejected the external drive and got the following error line in Console.

AppleFileServer: GetAttrListStandardVolumeInfo: geattslist failed with errno: 2!

Then every 10 seconds after that I would get this one:

AppleFileServer: _Assert: /SourceCache/afpserver/afpserver-643/afpserver/FPCarbonVol.cpp, 71 (-35)

I have two WD my Book Studio II drives hooked up using FW800 to my Mac Mini. Both are configured as Raid 1 using WD drive manager. What's interesting is that sometimes they will sleep and other times not. What I've found is that as long as there are no apps currently using the drives I can briefly press the power button on the drive which will eject it and shut it down. Not the best solution but it's something.

I have a 1 TB LaCie external drive that won't sleep. I also have a 2 TB Seagate that does. The LaCie has to be unmounted and turned off… it does have a physical on-off switch. I don't boot of it, otherwise the problem is the same.

Like everyone here, I'm running Mavericks.

Since the Seagate drive is operating as expected, it can't be all Apples fault, but LaCie says it is.

It would be nice if Apple would comment on this. Have they?

I do not think they have made any public awareness info, which by now they should of since this issue seems to go all the way back to the original release of Mavericks but they did call me. I had a next level adivisor actually call me back to confirm that Apple is aware of the issue and is working on a resoluution. No timeframe was given for the fix.

My options were not to use the Firewire nor the Thuderbolt ports becuse the drives will not sleep so instead use the USB drives which should work normally, continue to use it this way till a fix is offered. Option two was they were going to assist me in rolling back to my original OS that came with my mac mini.

Nope, my drive is a Seagate 1.5TB USB and it won't sleep - keeps spinning. My current work-around is shutdown the iMac while I am not using it. It's a shame this is happening; Apple doesn't have the same customer support it had a few years ago.