Mavericks and External Hard Drives

I contacted Promise, and receieved a one-line response saying that they had no idea what thee problem could be.

I have tried everything, and as I've explained before, I have a new'ish iMac loaded, with 2 27" Thunderbolt Apple displays added, and a Promise Pegasus R4 (no other Thunderbolt devices). The R4 DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH MAVERICK. IT DOES NOT FUNCTION PROPERLY WITH TIME MACHINE. IT CRASHES AND REQUIRES A FORCED EJECT. ALL THE FILES ARE BROKEN, IT WILL NOT RESUME A TIME MACHINE BACKUP.

Yes, some also complain that WD and other HD's are also dying with Maverick, but I have installed a 3TB USB WD Ext HDD 1021 and it has performed Time Machine backups (inclusding incrementals) OK.

It is not just the iMac, the Time Machine, or perhaps the R4, but the R4 does not work with this iMac and Maverick, yet it was fine with Mountian Lion... it only died under Maverick. It will format, but it will not function Maverick with Time Machine.

Soooo... PROMISE... you have obviously NOT tested it thoroughly with Maverick, and lying about that online when your support people admit otherwise isn't helping your preputation. I have been through at least 4 other threads here on this issue, and they all complain aboutPromise Pegasus being dysfuntional with Maverick.

PS... the R4 uses a GUID partition, and the WD USB uses Master Boot record... perhaps Maverick is having an issue with GUID ???

Hi Bosto,

I believe that the "I dont know what the problem is" comes from when you complete the case request on the Promise site; you get a selection of 'reason' responses and that is the default - not a response from somebody at Promise...

Dickot,

Thanks... they have been quiet on the posts except to post that they have fully-tested with maverick (which, HA! BS) or say that no one has reported any problems.

i too have a OWC Firewire drive and it wont sleep after ejecting or putting my laptop to sleep...i did switch it out to a usb and it somewhat works..if the usb is plugged in straight through the laptops USB ports it will spin down upon ejecting but it wont stop spinning if i put the labtop to sleep the drive will still be up and running.. but if its hook up to a USB hub the hardrive will sleep with the computer automaticlly when i put my laptop to sleep..

See my post at:

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

Here's a solution which has worked so well for me I no longer care whether Apple fix the prpoblem or not! (they admitted to me in an AppleCare conversation that it is a known issue - namely that Mavericks causes FireWire, and ONLY FireWire external drives to eject unceremoniously when the computer goes to sleep). As my Time Machine backup was on my Promise DS4600 FW800 RAID, it was a huge pain as I was no longer able to backup at night.

So, here's how I solved it, and it works, and works great! (originally I created an all-black jpeg and used that as a screen-saver with the Preference pane set to never sleep, but I could still see the LED lights faintly glowing through the LCD, and that bothered me). Aftert much, much searching, and finding many solutions that no longer worked because they were for older versions of OSX, I found two apps which together solved the problem perfectly. They are:

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/16811/appstartsaver

and then you configure it to start this amazing Sleep Display app, check off

➕ Bring launched program to front

➕ Stop launched program when computer becomes active again

➕ Restart Program if it ends while screensaver is running

and away you go!

https://github.com/tobiastom/Sleep-Display/downloads

Where Sleep Display is so much better than a black image screensaver is that it turns the brightness down to zero!

Also, remember to go to Energy Saver in your Preferences and set the Computer sleep and the Display sleep to Never. If you don't do this, the above solution won't work.

Enjoy!

That's ingeneous. However, (if I understand it correctly) it means that the system never sleeps, which means that the Mac itself and the external hard drives continue to spin. This probably uses some more energy although the life of the drives would probably not be much shortened, especialy as we hope, and expect, Apple will fix this fault soon (along with the long-standing Magic Mouse problem).

Are you selling this. Very convenient that AppleCare confided in only you in a private call. Most convincing. I refrain from using third party crapware to attempt to patch OSs. Usually ends in disaster. Two in combination is a recipe for a computer tragedy.

Good luck but no thank you. My firewire drives are still running fine under Mavericks.

Cheers

Pete

petermac87 wrote:

.......

My firewire drives are still running fine under Mavericks.

Cheers

Pete

Just to be clear, are you saying that you have external firewire drives which sleep when your Mavericks Mac sleeps or is shut down, every time?

Have you got an iMac or a laptop?

Thanks.

I have a 27" mid-2010 iMac with an external FW800 RAID array. When the iMac goes to sleep it forcibly disconnects the drive, causing the pop-up on waking which says you've been a bad lad and unplugged the drive without ejecting!

My hard drives are set to never sleep anyway because the RAID takes forever to spin up if it's asleep (one drive, then the next, then the next, then the last).

No, Peter, I am NOT selling any of this! It is all Freeware. And it wasn't Apple themselves directly but one of their online tech support folk (I have kept a transcript just in case naysayers like you disbelieve me). I have nothing to gain other than helping my fellow Mac user and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting otherwise.

It is neither CRAPware nor is it patching the OS, it is merely a way of solving a painful problem until Apple gets around to doing it. Surely at some point you've downloaded a FREE app from the App store to address a situation you needed to address, and found the app beneficial? How is this different from what I've done? Huh?

If the situation doesn't affect you, what the heck are you shooting your mouth off for? The mere fact that you are snooping around this forum suggests otherwise...

FWIW here's the transcript (dates, times and names removed to protect the helpful agent... he's in this colour, I'm in blue)

Specialist profile

Now Chatting with Xxxx

Thanks for contacting CPU. My name is Xxxx. Please give me a moment to look over your information.

Hello, Xxxx! Thank you so much for waiting. How are you doing today?

Pretty good

I have a 27" iMac mid-2010 (Serial Number QP1110LADNR) which is still under AppleCare. It has a Promise DS4600 RAID connected by FW800. Since Mavericks every time the display goes to sleep the OS appears to disconnect the RAID causing an error message on waking up that the drive(s) were disconnected improperly. The Energy Saver Preference is set to: Computer Sleep - Never Display Sleep - 15 minutes Put HD to sleep when possible is UNchecked

Ok, well I definitely understand why you would contact us about that and I do want to get you as much help as possible for this issue your having today. Would you mind if I asked a few questions about this issue?

Sure. Go ahead

Has this issue been persisting since the installation of Mavericks or did it occur after a period of time?

Since the installation

Ok, thank you for providing me with that information, Xxxx. It looks like this is currently a known issue related to Mavericks and our engineers are actively working on a fix for this issue. It should be updated in the near future and implemented in a firmware update.

So in the meantime is there any kind of a workaround? I have Time Machine backing up to the RAID and this means that I no longer have backups happening. Very worrying

Yeah I would definitely feel the same. Do you have the option to perform a backup over USB 3.0 instead of FW800? It looks like the issue is specifically with Firewire.

I wish I had USB 3. I only have USB 2 (mid-2010) :-(

Ah I see, USB would be my best recommendation currently for this issue even though I know that it's slower than FW800. I can add your email to a list of this issue so you can be updated when engineering makes a fix. Would you like me to do that?

Yes please. That would be very much appreciated. I was thinking of setting the display to never sleep and then perhaps finding a software solution that could blank the display after a predetermined period of time. Would that work?

Yeah that could definitely be an option for the meantime. There should be an app out there that allows the screen to turn off for energy preferences without the actually hard drive going to sleep.

OK, thanks. I'll have to do some digging...

Apple may record and retain the following conversation for quality control and training purposes.

I just lost use of my Segate FireWire 800 drive with Mavericks. I never notived until last week that it was not going to sleep after upgrading to Mavericks. Now the drive no longer shows as connected. I have tried restarting, unplugging the drive, changing FW ports, nothing. This was my Time Machine Drive, because Apple's are too expensive. I even tried rebooting with teh utility disk. It appears Mavericks is corrupting external hard drives at will.

ANY ADVICE?

The Seagate "not going to sleep" doubtfully has anything to do with the problem on this page, because it deals with Mavericks unceremoniously disconnecting (rather than ejecting properly) FW drives when the computer goes to sleep... I suspect your problem is more likely the fact that disconnecting the drive forcibly caused corruption if Time Machine was writing to the drive at the time.

My suggestion would be to implement the "fix" I have outlined above, reformat the drive, and start afresh...

The issue of all these external drives that will not spin down even after ejected has now been going on for several months. We even saw Mavericks update to 10.9.1 and yet this issue still lingers on.

Has anybody actually been able to get Apple to reply in this situation?

As an update to the above situation:

1. I have had zero further communication from Apple on this matter
2. Despite being totally up-to-date as to OS X software revisions (10.9.1), the problem persisted
3. I have ceased using FW800 as the connection method to my Promise DS4600 RAID and use USB 2.0 instead :-(
4. The communication speed has dropped a bit (not as much as I thought) but the problem has totally disappeared!

So, before my Apple Care runs out (in April) I intend get Apple to repair this turkey yet again (replaice the DVD drive for the second time, repair the dust leakage into the LCD and fix the video curruption during boot) and then I plan to possibly punt the old girl and get a new one with USB 3 plus SSD and expect it to fly in comparison.

I might just wait one more model year if the gal continues to function reasonably. It all depends...