Disks spin down (sleep) unbidden

Under Tiger (10.4.6) One or more of my internal hard drives spin down (sleep) when the drive isn't accessed for a short time, even if I'm using the computer, e.g. typing a message.
I have unchecked "put hard disks to sleep" in the Energy Saver and trashed the preferences (Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist) and reset the pram. The problem still happens.
Can anyone help?

This problem is definitely related to Tiger, at least partly. Previously, I was running 10.2, and this didn't happen.
It's not the only change to my drive behavior that appeared when I installed Tiger. At some point when I was running 10.2, I mistakenly moved my third internal hard drive (which is on its own interface card) to the wrong connector on the ribbon cable. The drive still worked, but it would spin down after an hour or so if I didn't access the drive. But the other 2 drives would keep spinning. When I installed Tiger, things changed. It didn't even see that third drive at all, and the other 2 drives would spin down after some short time (like 15 minutes or so) of inactivity. I moved the drive to the correct connector on the ribbon cable, and all of a sudden, Tiger recognized the drive -- but that drive now spins down too after a short time. Again, this is a new behavior under Tiger.
FYI, I migrated from 10.2 to 10.4, so it could have been a change introduced in 10.3.
G4 dual 1GHz Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Similar Messages

Disks spinning down unbidden

you folks in this topic are so knowledgeable, maybe you can shed some light on this one. I got no answer for it in other topics, maybe because some underlying Unix thing is related to the problem? Or not. I don't have a clue.
Under Tiger (10.4.6) One or more of my internal hard drives spin down (sleep) when the drive isn't accessed for a short time, even if I'm using the computer, e.g. typing a message or editing a file. This is a new behavior that appeared when I installed Tiger, under 10.2 and 10.1 it didn't happen (I skipped 10.3).
I have unchecked "put hard disks to sleep" in the Energy Saver and trashed the preferences (Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist) and reset the pram. The problem still happens. I don't even have a clue which piece of software is responsible for this.
Can anyone help?

Bill's got a good reply there... but if you don't understand what using sudo does, you might want to do a quick bit of reading (in very VERY short: you are 'God' on that machine)
You should check out pmset -g as well (don't need to run it with sudo ('as root')

Internal Hard Disk spin down - Mac locks up

Hi.
Recently my iMac has started to occasionally lock up. The other evening it was quiet and I heard the hard drive spin down. Following this any action results in the beach ball, and eventually everything locks up, because it cannot read from or write to the disk.
I have tried disabling hard drive sleep. Reseting the SMC and PRAM.
Not sure if it is related, but I also noticed that the system profiler reports that the last hardware test was run in 4008 (I'm sure it used to say 2008). So I ran a hardware test, no problems. The last hardware test date is now reported as 28th June 4010. Hmmmm.
Any thoughts on this, or help as to the next step will be very happily received.

It is normal to see the spinning beach ball cursor while the drive spins up, but obviously it should go away once the drive is spun up & the iMac should not eventually lock up.
Also, not every drive honors the spin-down command from the OS -- some spin down automatically according to their own internal timer regardless of the system preference -- but AFAIK no drive Apple ships in any Mac does this.
So just to cover all the possibilities, can you confirm that your iMac has the original internal drive it shipped with, & that there are no external drive(s) attached to it? If you do have any external drives, does the issue persist if they are unattached?
You might want to run Disk Utility's Verify/Repair Disk step on each drive you use to make sure a file system issue is not involved, & the Apple Hardware Test (which will require removing any non-essential peripherals like external drives & thus not test them) to see if a hardware issue is causing this.

Hard disk spin-down

I have installed a second hard drive (500GB Western Digital SATA SE16) in my Mac Pro quad-core. The drive spins down regardless of the power management settings (system preferences) and does so even when I’m actively working, but not directly accessing the second drive. It then spins up, with a corresponding time lag of 10-20 seconds and the spinning beach ball, when drive access is necessary. I know from the WD website that there is a setting for a jumper on pins 3 & 4 which will prevent spin down (much like would be required for a RAID setup). Does it make sense to enable that jumper to prevent spin down in this case? Will the system power management settings still function properly with the jumper set? Thanks for any input.

Hi Pascal,
"I'd really love to be able to work in silence.. and also save my poor hard disk !"
As you already know, constantly spinning up and down is very bad for a hard disk.
The best would be to have it sleeping all the time, but if this is not possible, better leave it spinning constantly then.
"What is the annoying Panther feature (that Jaguar or OS9 didn't have) that keeps spinning my disk ?"
I'm not sure about that, but I think it has to do with the constant rewriting of files that Mac OS X uses (causing defragmentation as a side-effect, BTW).
My guess is that this didn't happen to your newly installed system, but now happens because there is much more fragmented free space on your hard drive.
Another explanation is if the OS X behaviour mentioned has been enhanced after 10.3.6 or so?
Or this can be also the kind of buggy behaviour described here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1267183#1267183
The default spindown time if you choose "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in Energy Saver, is 10 minutes of inactivity.
You can use Cocktail or TinkerTool System to modify this 10 minutes delay, or paste this Terminal command:
sudo pmset -a spindown 2
to reduce the required inactivity to 2 minutes
(but again, this is not what you are looking for, as this is worse than leaving it constantly spinning, unless perfect silence is so important to you).
I don't know how to tell Mac OS X to behave like former systems though, and I don't even know if it is possible at all.
Usually someone would like to set a longer spindown delay, like
sudo pmset -a spindown 120
for example.
Good luck!
Axl

External disk spin down

I have a OWC firewire 800 external hard drive. I want to know if there is a way that I can keep it from spinning down so that info can be accessed more readily. After all what's the point of having a high speed external if it has to spin up every time I want to access it?

Go to system preferences / energy saver / sleep and uncheck put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible

Hard Disks Spinning Down

Apologies if this has been answered.
In the Energy Saver preferences, I have unchecked the preference to spin down the hard disks (put them to sleep). But even so, the disks still spin down, which leaves me staring at the beach ball several times a day. I have the other preferences set to sleep both the system and display after 1 hour.
Is there a way in 10.4.6 to keep the disks from spinning down?
QuickSilver Mac OS X (10.4.6)

I have the same problem with a similar, if not identical, computer.
I have unchecked "put hard disks to sleep" in the Energy Saver and trashed the preferences (Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist)
The problem still happens. Can anyone help?

Attached disk spin down

Anybody figure out how to have the attached USB drives spin down when not in use? I'm guessing it will have to be a new firmware fix... Otherwise, I guess Apple will be OK with buying everybody new disks next year... works for me..

There are multiple threads discussing this issue. One of them is "Any idea whether the AE spins down USB hard drives?"

Hard disk spins during sleep

Somehow even when the screen is black my hard disks keeps spinning which is surely likely to wear it out sooner rather than later.
Any idea what I can do?

milew66 wrote:
Thanks, unfortunately I do not have applecare, although still have time on my warranty. It ***** that no one can answer a simple question for me over the phone. I pay 1800$ for a computer that is supposed to be top of the line, 6 months later it is talking in its sleep, and they want 19$ to answer a question over the phone. I really do not want to lug my 27 inch computer an hour away if this can be resolved another way.
Are there ANY doagnostic/hardware tests/software that I can buy or whatever to run and let me know if the HDD has errors? I have windows installed as well via bootcamp. If I run a hard drive scanner on that side, will it only scan that partition?
OS X has exactly what you need built into it, OS X is a much more efficient system than MS Windows.There is a utility called Disk Utility built into the system, to repair the HD and check for it's overall health boot in the Recover Partion, to do this when you hear the startup tone hold down the OPTION Key and choose the Recovery Partion, then choose Disk Utility and you can run Repair Disk. If it has errors (which I'm almost certain yours does not) they will be reported. I would also recommend you run Repair Disk Permissions and also read:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448
BTW as long as your machine is less than 1 year old you can still buy AppleCARE, if you still can then I'd strongly recommend you do so. If for no other reason it will provide you 3 years of peace of mind and you can call AppleCare support if you have anyquestions. If your machine is covered by AppleCARE and requires a part replacement 3x Apple will replace your machine. In addition if you live within 50 miles of an AASP you can request on-site service.

Hard disk spinning during SLEEP is normal - says ASP

I was concerned about my computer making some quiet noises while in sleep mode. But I asked about this to an ASP I recently visited and he said sometimes the HDD comes and does some stuff.
I feel a little bit better, but the fact that my computer really isn't fully asleep sort of concerns me.

milew66 wrote:
Thanks, unfortunately I do not have applecare, although still have time on my warranty. It ***** that no one can answer a simple question for me over the phone. I pay 1800$ for a computer that is supposed to be top of the line, 6 months later it is talking in its sleep, and they want 19$ to answer a question over the phone. I really do not want to lug my 27 inch computer an hour away if this can be resolved another way.
Are there ANY doagnostic/hardware tests/software that I can buy or whatever to run and let me know if the HDD has errors? I have windows installed as well via bootcamp. If I run a hard drive scanner on that side, will it only scan that partition?
OS X has exactly what you need built into it, OS X is a much more efficient system than MS Windows.There is a utility called Disk Utility built into the system, to repair the HD and check for it's overall health boot in the Recover Partion, to do this when you hear the startup tone hold down the OPTION Key and choose the Recovery Partion, then choose Disk Utility and you can run Repair Disk. If it has errors (which I'm almost certain yours does not) they will be reported. I would also recommend you run Repair Disk Permissions and also read:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448
BTW as long as your machine is less than 1 year old you can still buy AppleCARE, if you still can then I'd strongly recommend you do so. If for no other reason it will provide you 3 years of peace of mind and you can call AppleCare support if you have anyquestions. If your machine is covered by AppleCARE and requires a part replacement 3x Apple will replace your machine. In addition if you live within 50 miles of an AASP you can request on-site service.

How do I automatically spin down the hard drive to save power?

I have searched for this in the wiki and the forums, so if I've missed something, please point it out to me, but is there a way to have Arch automatically spin down hard drives and/or suspend the machine to ram to save power? I'm not really interested in the full suspend to disk because I don't think my BIOS will do a wake on lan, and I'm trying to run a home server here.
Anyway, I'm just looking for ways to save on my electricity usage. Any ideas?

If the HD is just used for storage, hdparm is your friend. with hdparm -S you can set the timeout until the disk spins down.
If its a system disk hdparm will work too, but the HD will spin up after 2 secs (or less, depending on your HD) again because of the OS accessing the disk (logs, journal etc). Laptop-mode-tools works very well on laptops because it automatically sets the journal-rewrite time, file-write-cache size and the time when new data gets written to the disk. If you are not reading anything or anything thats not in the cache, it works very well - but thats on laptops. I tried using laptop-mode-tools on my desktop, but without luck (yes, it detected that i wasnt using a laptop).
You could try using cpudyn with the cpu-idling stuff disabled (option -i 0). I know it has a feature that spins down a specific HD after a certain amount of time. But i don't know for sure if cpudyn automatically remounts the HD, so that it caches all the write activity (like laptop-mode-tools).
Good luck.

Harddisk spinning down every five minutes - how to stop this?

Hello,
I recently put two 500 GByte drives into my MacPro. They work fine, but there is one "feature" I would like to turn off. The disks spin down automatically if not used for about five minutes and need about 10 seconds to spin up again when I need them which gets a bit annoying sometimes.
Anybody that can tell me where I can make them run all the time? I checked control panels - no luck here.
Regards,
Armin

Energy Saver - Spin down when not in use - is the normal way to turn that off.
Are you using RE2 or SE16?

Time Capsule will not spin down

I have read some similar posts regarding this issue, but none could I find that is similar to my issue. I have an older Time Capsule (model #1254) which I recently upgraded from 500 GB to a Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200 rpm 64 MB cache SATA 6.0 GB/s drive. Old drive was full. Since doing so the Time Capsule will not stop spinning, even when both of my computers are asleep or even shut down. The outside of the TC case is warm to the touch and I can feel and hear the drive spinning. The previous 500 GB Seagate drive did not have any of these issues.
Last night, while at home, I tried downgrading the firmware several times, but no luck. I have since read on the discussions to try renaming the TC and also, resetting the TC. I was hoping that someone else has had similar issues with a similar setup and has stumpled upon a solution. Obviously, I'm worried about the heat eventually killing my TC!
I decided on the 2 TB Seagate drive after reading other forums and discussions, but maybe I choose poorly?
Thanks all!

Hi, after some tests i went to a new situation, which allows me to spin down the disk, in certain circumstances. It took me a week, so I want to share this experience in case it would be of any help.
I executed the following operations using a MacBook Pro with a new installation of OS X 10.6 from an external disk. This is not necessary, but I wanted to exclude the possibility of some app or hidden process in my system, or even some unknown (to me) new feature of OS X 10.9 using the TC disk without my awareness. During all the test, no other device was connected to the TC network.
First, I copied the Time Machine spare disk volume from the TC to an external USB drive, via the USB port at the back of the TC.
Then I formatted the TC disk to all zeros and reset the TC configuration to factory default.
At this point, restarting the TC, the disk was spinning for hours like before, no change. But now I can exclude it was the OS X Spotlight indexing the files: with the disk formatted to zero, there was nothing to index. So, Spotlight is not guilty to for this buggy behavior of the TC.
Now what happened is that I mounted the TC with Finder, and, 5 minutes later, the disk stopped from spinning. I can't say if this would happen even if I wouldn't format the disk, as I don't remember the last time I mounted the TC as a remote disk. If someone has this problem, I believe this is the first thing to try, keep the TC mounted and see if the disk spins down.
Then I went back to my Mavericks installation, copied the Time Machine spare disk volume, perviously backed up to the external disk, back into the TC. And finally reconfigured Time Machine to keep on using the old backup volume.
Now Time Machine regularly backs up every hour, and 5 minutes later the disk spins down. But this only works when the TC is mounted as remote disk. Whenever I unmount it, and then backup, the disk keeps his old behavior and doesn't spin down.
I think it is out of discussion that the spin down command always comes from the TC and not from the Mac, because the default spin down time of OS X Mavericks is set to 10 minutes (and so is mine), while my TC now spins down after 5 minutes, according to his settings. So, the TC is able to spin down my non-original disk, but only when he likes. This means that if I disconnect my Mac from the TC network, and someone else connects his Mac to the same network, without mounting the TC drive, it will start spinning endlessly. This is definitively crazy.

USB disk won't spin down

I tried asking this in the iMac forum, but as it seems to be a software issue, I hope you don't mind me posting it here:
I have a new iMac and a Lacie Blade Runner external 4TB USB 3.0 drive. Unfortunately when I power off the Mac, the Lacie keeps spinning and will not power down - very annoying.
Here's the strange thing though. When connected to my Mac Mini, the drive does power down properly when I shut the Mini down. (Both Macs are on 10.8.4). Also, when I power the iMac down in Bootcamp, the drive also spins down properly. So it does not appear to be a hardware issue.
I have "put the drives to sleep" (or whatever it is called) checked, btw.
Also, the disk will spin down if I put the iMac to sleep. It's only when I shutdown the iMac fully that the Lacie drive keeps spinning forever.
Any ideas how to get the external drive to power off properly when I shut down?

Is bumping allowed ;-)
Come on chaps - does no-one have any ideas? My drive is unusable if I have to keep turning it on and off all the time! How do I get an external USB drive to power off when I switch off my iMac? Surely there's something I can check?
My Mac Mini shuts it down just fine, but the iMac won't. Both on 10.8.4.
Any ideas?

WRT160NL: Automatic spin-down of external USB hard disks?

Hello,
do external hard disks automatically spin down after a period with no access/use when connected with the USB port of the WRT160NL?

In reference to your post could you please let me know that when you say "spin down" do you mean that does the hard drive goes into sleep mode when it is not in use?
Did you try to connect another hard drive and check whether it is the same case or not?

FCP 5 and Tiger = do I need any utility to not spin-down my LaCie disks?

Before Tiger, I had a small utility that prevented my FW-disks not to spin down.
I run FCP 5, DVDSP4, SoundTrack Pro and some other apps on an iBook G4 and an G4 Dual.
After blowing the iBook disk, I have installed Tiger, and after each app install, I repair the disk permissions. Also after every software upgrade I repair the permission. Should I think of anything else to get a fresh clean system to start working in?
TIA

To force your drives to never sleep:
Launch the Terminal application (Applications>Utilities>Terminal) and type:
sudo pmset spindown x
type your password when it asks for it.
x=the number of minutes that you want till your drive spins down.
0 = never
More info on using pmset here:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1. html
And I found this here
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html
I hope that this helps.
And note that this is a more 'controlled' way of putting the hard disk to sleep than is possible in >system preferences>energy saver>sleep>
If you go that way, checked means 10 minutes and unchecked means 180 minutes (not never).
Good luck.
x

Disks spin down (sleep) unbidden

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