Drive sleep too quickly - all drives, regardless of energy saver settings

i have a g5 quad which from day one has had "narcolepsy issues". all drives (boot and secondary internal sata, fw400, fw800, usb2, and esata) have a tendency to spin down very soon, resulting in SBBODs. sometime for the standard few seconds but often indefinitely resulting in "not responding" status in both the finder and drive dependent apps like final cut pro.
energy saver settings all set to never - and spin down when possible is unchecked.
boot drives have been zero level formatted 4 times now, so im dead certain its not a drive issue...
i have heard of others having this issue but have yet had anyone propose any solutions.
help! - wG
g5quad Mac OS X (10.4.8)

I would first try a PMU reset and nvram reset. Instructions here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300341
and here:
http://www.macosg.com/group/viewtopic.php?t=5819
Secondly I would create another user account and see if the problem persists.

Similar Messages

Firewire drives sleeping too much.... help?

Hi all,
I have seven external Firewire drives, both Lacie D2 and G-Raid. Seems like ever since I got the G5 these drives go to sleep in about 10 minutes if I don't access them. Then when I have to do a search, or use the finder, I have to wait for a full minute while the drives individually spin up (one after the other after the other... etc.).
The System preferences settings make no difference. This is a big problem for me. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Matt

Well, Matt,
Energy Saver default behaviour is to spin down all internals and externals that are left unaccessed, at the same time after 10 minutes of inactivity, if you chose the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" option.
And to let them all awake if it is unchecked.
—> One thing you can set yourself manually without Developer Tools:
The spindown time for all internals and externals.
Set it to 120 minutes instead of 10, using this Terminal command:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 120
so that they stay awake long enough but sleep at night still.
If you want them to never spindown, type this command:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 0
If this works, it means a preference file is corrupted somewhere. The one that "tells" Energy Saver settings to PowerManagement.
I don't know which one is it, but hopefully Preferential Treatment would find it?
(Here, a Terminal command that verifies even more prefs than PT:
sudo find /Library/Preferences -name *.plist -exec plutil {} \;;find ~/Library/Preferences -name *plist -exec plutil {} \;
Let us know!
Curious too,
Axl

Hard drives sleep - not energy saver settings

I have two(2) different Quad 2.7 Pro Mac computers, both with 2 500GB Seagate drives mirror raided internally and Sonnet Fusion D500 SATA enclosures with 5 500GB seagates RAID striped.
They all fall asleep after inactivity, and it take several seconds for the drives to spin back up. The energy saver is set to never. I even tried turing it on, restarting, turing it off, reseting, but it did not help.
I've removed the internal RAID and the external still sleeps, and vice versa.
My only thought is it it the seagate drives. They are refurbished baracuda 7200.9 drives.
Any ideas?

hello,
i'm experiencing the same issue. i have 4 internal raptors in RAID0 and 4 external WD drives in a PM enclosure and have found that they too sleep as you mentioned.
i checked the energy saver and the box is unchecked to "put drives to sleep when possible" also...
i installed Leopard the other day when i got the new enclosure and external equipment - clean install - so i don't know if it would do the same in Tiger...
any suggestions, or is this normal for exterior storage - regardless if it is SATA or not?

Machine goes to sleep faster than Energy Saver settings

Hi all,
(I've searched for existing threads aboutthis but couldn't find any. Hope I'm not "re" posting)
I use my laptop (MBP 2.4, 8gb, INtel Core i7) to play music live, so I need it to not go to sleep for at least... 30-40 minutes as I will frequently not touch it directly for that long as I'm busy playing my instruments. But it goes to sleep consistently after about 10 minutes even though I've got the display set to sleep abfter 1.5 hours and the computer to sleep after 2 hrs.
Then I noticed the same thing on my Mac Pro in my studio. Same Energy Saver settings, still goes to sleep after about 10-15 minutes. Which means I have to re-enter my password there too. Same thing on my older MBP. Theyr'e all on Lion 10.7.4.
This is very annoying. Anyone know what I'm doign wrong?
Huge thanks!

I'm not sure why Energy Saver is doing that, but you may want to download Caffeine from the Mac App Store. It's a menu bar application that you can click and unclick that, when clicked, keeps your Mac on until it is unclicked or if you close the laptop lid/manually put it to sleep.

I install window 8 and Unfortunatly all drive format. And all drive mix, now i have only 1 DRIVE C. I want Bit locker Drive's data Back

Last sunday i install a window 8 and this window format my all drive & make it 1 drive (DRIVE C). Before all of this i have 5 drive in different size with 1 Bitlocker protect drive.
So i try data recovery software to recover my data. i got back all my data without that ( bitlocker ) protected drive.
so please guys help me how can i get back data from bitlocker protected drives.
please please help me.

Hi,
I sorry for your experience, but there is no way to recovery the data encryped by BitLocker untill now.
BitLocker is designed to make the encrypted drive unrecoverable without the required authentication. When in recovery mode, the user needs the recovery password or recovery key to unlock the encrypted drive. Therefore, we highly recommend
that you store the recovery information in AD DS or in another safe location.
Please refer to the link below for the statement:
http://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ee449438(v=ws.10).aspx#BKMK_RecoveryInfo
Roger Lu
TechNet Community Support

Energy saver settings - weird sleep behaviour

I have customized Energy saver with the following:
When power Adapter: display sleep 5 min, computer sleep 1hr
When battery: display sleep 3 minutes, computer sleep 10 minutes.
This works when I first boot up my Mac. However after the first sleep things get akward, it almost seems to me that MacOSX has swapped these two settings.
Symptoms: I rebooted my Mac this afternoon. I unplug the power cord. The Mac goes to sleep after 10 minutes.
I wake the Mac. I leave it still. The screen stays on unusually long. After 20 minutes the Mac is still not asleep as it should be. It usually remains like this until the next complete system reboot.
This gets annoying when on the go and energy saving really is needed...
What is happening? Any weird settings file corrupt from previous versions of the system?
All suggestions welcome...
JS
Powerbook G4 12 Mac OS X (10.4.8) System upgraded from 10.3

1. You wrote: " the system doesn't shut down at all (an hour after I left the room) when it's supposed to shut down in 4 minutes, as currently set."This is the first you've mentioned about a problem with shutdown, which I would presume to mean a problem with "scheduled shutdown." Previously, you were writing about sleep.
Are you confusing "idle sleep" with "shutdown" in your post? Let's clarify what you mean by "shut down" in the quote above.
2. If the problem is idle sleep, then see "Mac OS X: Why your Mac might not sleep or stay in sleep mode." In addition to the causes cited therein, and the corrupted Energy Saver preferences we discussed earlier, some other common inhibitors of idle sleep include:
• Runaway processes incessantly writing to Console logs will keep the hard drive active and prevent idle sleep. Vendor-provided software included with HP All-In-One devices and Canon scanners are common culprits, but other apps have been known to continuously write to Console logs. See my "Checking Console for clues" FAQ and look for repeating blocks of messages being written at high frequency.
• Classic Sleep. If you're running Classic apps, be sure that the "Put Classic to sleep when it is inactive for…" slider is set to other than Never in the System Preferences > Classic > Advanced tab.
3. If the problem is with scheduled shutdown, how that works depends on the version of Mac OS X 10.4 you are using. See:• If 10.4.5 or earlier, see "Mac OS X's Shut Down schedule will only work when one user is logged in."
• If 10.4.6 or later, see Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later: Scheduled shut down occurs at Login window even if users are logged in."
Note that your Mac must be awake at the appointed time for scheduled shutdown to work. See "Mac OS X 10.3 and later: Computer must be awake for scheduled shutdown to occur."
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Mac does not sleep after setting Energy Saver settings

Hi, got a slight problem after installing Leopard. The thing is that my Mac seems to ignore the settings specified in Energy Saver Preference Pane, the screen is put to sleep as it should, that's working fine, but the computer does not go to sleep when designated. I can put it to sleep manually (or by using Schedule) but setting an inactivity time doesn't work.
No visible console messages or similar, no external HDDs or other external devices, no bluetooth, no file sharing, no bad apparent application/process running, no spotlight indexing, as you see I have tried a few things to fix the problem...
Any ideas of how to fix this problem would be appreciated. Thanks.
Message was edited by: Chessax

Ok, seems like I fixed the problem, the numerous things I tried must have solved it, probably the SMC or PRAM/NVRAM fixed it, though I'm not sure, but anyway it's working now, so I'm good.
And to asphotos: No I don't have any printer at all, and I don't use airport, not sure what caused the problem really, just appeared after Snow Leopard install... Thanks for the tip though.

Using my c drive memory too quickly

My satellite a505-s6965 has went from 454 gb t 300 in 1 month. i believe it to be some back files or application data. but i am not that computer savvy. i have only installed a cad program and itunes. at this rate my computer will be full very soon.
help would be appreciated.

Satellite A505-S6965
Eventually, 15% of your hard drive will be filled with restore points unless you do something about it.
How to reduce the space allotted to System Restore in Windows Vista
-Jerry

Display won't sleep using energy saver settings.

I’ve had this problem for some time. I repaired permissions and the sleep timer worked for about a day and then never again. I’ve tried closing all applications that might be running something, didn’t work. Reset pram and tried all the other things I’ve read about and nothing works. My son, who is a system admin and knows OS and Windows said he was having the same problem running Yosemite. I’m running 10.8.5 on a late 2010 iMac.

Long shot.
Do a backup.
Quit the application.
In Finder hold down the option/alt key while selecting the Go menu item. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.
Restart the computer, open the application and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.
If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer ones.
If you want to make your user library permanently visible, run the below command in Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
chflags nohidden ~/Library/
You will need to do that after any updates.

Make External Drive Sleep?

New Macbook Pro with Mountain Lion, which spends most nights plugged in, with an external drive attached for Time Machine backup.
My former backup drive, a Seagate Freeagent Go, would go to sleep whenever my laptop was asleep, or when ejected. When the computer woke up, the drive did too and all was well (unlike the problems a few users seem to have had with drives not waking).
I recently installed a 512GB Crucial SSD (MS PowerPoint opens in about 1 second!), and moved the TOSHIBA MK7559 750 GB drive that came inside the Macbook Pro to an external USB3 case, so that I would have a bigger backup capacity. It works very well for backup, but the drive keeps spinning even if the computer is asleep, and even after being ejected. The check box in Energy Saver Prefs is checked to allow drives to sleep when possible.
It is almost certain that problem is with the drive case's firmware, not with my Mac or the OS. What I am looking for is a workaround. Is anyone aware of any utilities that might let me force it to spin down? I am concerned about the long term reliability of the drive if it keeps running 24 hours a day.

Most of the time this feature is built into the Drive Enclosure and has nothing to do with the operating system running the computer.
So it would seem the enclosure you have does not support such a feature.

Hard Drive Sleep Issue

I´ve got one problem with my Mac Pro running a fresh tiger installation. My internal hard drives go to sleep although i´ve unchecked the "enable hard drive sleep" checkbox in the energysaver prefpane. i am using 4 internal hds and after a while of one or more being inactive i can hear them spinnig up upon reactivation (doubleclick) and there is a certain delay in responsiveness (e.g. windows opening up...). Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

There is a utility named "spindown fix" that can resolve the issue of HD's not staying up even after you've unchecked "put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible." Apparently that doesn't actually do anything
Normally, I let my drives spin down to conserver energy and keep everything cooler, including external FW drives. But sometimes when I'm using Final Cut Pro, I don't want the delay while I await a spin up. So I uncheck "HD sleep" in energy saver and then run Spindown Fix. It seems to work.
Search the web for "spindown fix."
(edit): I did some more research, and at least in 10.4.11, if you have the system sleep other than "never" and don't check the HD sleep option in energy saver, the HD sleep doesn't becomre "never" but rather 180 minutes. You can verify this for your system by using the plist editor (part of development tools package delivered with 10.4) and examining libarary/preferences/systemconfiguration/com.apple.powermangement/plist
In the AC power custom profile, you'll find the parameter Disk Sleep Time; you can examine how it varies based on your energy saver settings. Some say to set it to zero to prevent spin down form occurring every; I would not necessarily recommend that if 180 minutes is long enough for your.
Eddie O
Message was edited by: Edward A. Oates to add information

"C" drive & Profile crash-so all attachments are in crashed profile? Just want to make sure?

1-had C drive crash a few days ago and am rebuilding on new C drive > NEW copy of TB 24.6.0
2-Had Local Folders on a separate drive > in Tools – Account Settings – Local Folders > set to previous location
3-After studying many support responses is it correct that the actual attachments are still in the Profile on the crashed "C" drive?
4-Searched all drives on "new" system and found no "Profile" or "*.mbox" files - where are they?
Just want to make sure cause the mozmsgs/wdseml on the "separate drive" only have message text when imported. If this is TRUE then I've got to focus my effort on recovering the Profile from the crashed disk. Yes, I did not have a backup - my bad for sure.
Thank you,
Tom

In Thunderbird, messages are stored as they are received, along with all headers and all attachments.
In your profile, there will be folders with no extension, such as ''Inbox''. These are mailbox files. Each has an accompanying index file, in this example ''Inbox.msf''. You don't need the msf files.
The profile folder is hidden, so to find it you'll need to enable displaying of hidden files.
mozmsgs is provided just to make the message contents available to Windows' searching mechanisms, so these files are not important to your restoration task.
I really don't like the business of setting mail account folder locations using the Local Directory option. It removes the particular folder from your profile and makes maintenance very much harder, since now only ''you'' will know where the re-located data lives. None of the usual techniques or tools for working with profiles will work with the detached data.

IMac sleeps too soon since Mountain Lion

I have a mid 2011 iMac i5 27'' on which I have installed Mountain Lion.
Everything is working great, except for one thing.
I have my Energy Saver set to the default Sleep of 10 mins of non use. Whenever I was downloading anything under Lion it would always stay awake until the download had finished, even if that was 2 or 3 hours. Since changing to Mountain Lion my iMac sleeps exactly as per Energy Saver settings regardless of the fact that there is network/hard drive activity.
It does this whether downloading to the internal hard drive or an external USB drive.
Is there a setting somewhere which needs tweaking? I have tried checking/unchecking "Wake for Network Access", but that doesn't make any difference.
Any ideas?

Hi Stepppy,
I have always used uTorrent on windows for my torrent-downloads. When I got my first Mac 1 month ago, Mac Mini (mid 2011), I was amazed at how Lion handled uTorrent! The Lion slept, while the torrents were downloading. For 2 days I worked like this. When I saw a FREE upgrade possibility for Mountain Lion I did not hesitate and downloaded...... expecting it to be better ofcourse..... I was wrong.
I use the mac solely for downloads and watching movies and shows(hooked up to my Sony LED 46HX820...sweet!).
After some browsing I finally found the caffeinate command to be the best work-around see (h t t p : //apple. stackexchange. com/questions/57951/mountain-lion-sleeps-too-aggressively), that is until the guys at uTorrent update the software, which they promised to do see (h t t p : //forum. utorrent . com / viewtopic . php ? id= 122652)
This is my setup for uTorrent:
My sleep settings for screen and hard disks are set to 1 minute, just because, I don't know, just because!
I open Terminal and use this command everytime I start downloads with uTorrent:
caffeinate -i open -W -a utorrent.app
(for other apps use that app's name instead of utorrent.app)
This should keep the system awake as long as uTorrent is running and not idle. To prevent any sleep at all, use -s instead of -i.
And I always set my uTorrent to Sleep After Downloads Complete.
I hope this helps you and some others.
Ofcourse, this is not what we want eventually, but I don't find it necessary to go back to Lion for this problem and I just hope the app will get an update!
Good luck

Can not wake up normally after sleeping too long

G5 with 23inch cinema LCD, Geforce 6600LE video card
if only sleep within 1 hour, it will wake up normally by moving mouse.
if more than 1 hour, the desktop will show but just last 2 seconds. and the display turns dark for 10 seconds and turns blue for 2 sec. and goes dark and repeat the cycle. finally stays dark.
checked this board. It seems not a single case. Anybody has any idea about this? thx a lot.

I have the same bloody problem. It started with my upgrade to Leopard. Short sleep is ok - wakes up alright. Longer sleep - comes up with black screen and roaring fans. Well done, Apple. Now I cannot and will not upgrade my laptop as a laptop that can't wake from sleep is about worthless.
I have: tried pulling the SystemConfiguration power management file out and restarting - didn't fix it.
I have also cloned my hard drive, erased and reinstalled Leopard, and restored the files and then installed all updates - and now I am back where I started, with black screens and roaring fans after restart (did the same thing before upon safe restart with shift key down, and also on single-user reboot after I started fsck (the roaring fan part, not the black screen). This counts as a major bug.
Other discussions suggested a problem with graphics drivers missing in Leopard, or perhaps unchecking the 'sleep disks when possible' option under the energy saver as a temporary workaround.
My laptop stays at 10.4.10.
Brian

2011 Clamshell mode (sleeping too soon)

New MacBook 2011 15", 10.6.7 updated
When In clamshell mode, if I turn the TV to a different input source (or turn it off), the computer goes to sleep right away. My 2008 Macbook will stay on however, allowing me to VNC with iTeleport (until the sleep scheduler kicks in normally).
Is there a setting I am missing to keep it from shutting off right away? I read about resetting SMC, but thought that was extreme for a brand new machine just out of the box.
Thank you.

(All energy saver settings are set to "always on", computer power is plugged in and is connected to bluetooth keyboard and touchpad).
When I VNC during the process, the screen goes blank on the remote VNC device but you can still see the top menu bar. When I switch the TV back to the correct source, the screen comes back and the VNC connection is never lost...
Message was edited by: zgmac

Drive sleep too quickly - all drives, regardless of energy saver settings

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