Effect of TM Disk Sleeping

I have "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" check in my Energy System Preferences. I have noticed that often when accessing my internal hard disk via Finder that I will get a beach ball while my external Firewire disk that is used for Time Machine is spinning up. It almost seems like Finder needs something from the TM disk before it accesses my internal disk.
It could be a coincidence that my internal drive is also spinning up at the same time, but I am not hearing any noticeable noises from my MacBook Pro that would indicate the internal drive is also spinning up.
I also have another external drive attached that is kept pretty busy and probably does not sleep very often. I have never noticed similar behavior with that hard drive having to spin up when I'm accessing my internal drive.
Mostly I'm curious if Time Machine is doing something that would cause the external TM drive to be accessed every time I access my internal drive.

gbullman wrote:
Mostly I'm curious if Time Machine is doing something that would cause the external TM drive to be accessed every time I access my internal drive.
It shouldn't be, unless of course it's starting a backup, but surely you'd have noticed that.
You may be seeing something else. Exclude your TM drive from any anti-virus scanning, and also, at least temporarily, from Spotlight indexing, via System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy.
If that stops it, at least you'll know what it is. If so, why it seems to happen when your internal spins up, I have no idea.

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Disable disk sleep for specific drive?

My Mac Pro is running 24/7 with sleep enabled.
Hard disks are set to sleep, when possible. One of my SSDs is on an internal PCIe card. With disk sleep enabled, it does not come up quickly enough and the computer keeps thinking, it was ejected. The problem goes away, when disabling disk sleep.
No sleep is no problem with SSDs, but there are some spinning 4TB disks on the system only used infrequently, so I would like to let them sleep.
Is there a way to disable sleep for a specific disk only?
-- Harald

Hi BahaSs,
It generally is safe to "Enable write caching on disk" unless you are dealing with broken applications which are not using
FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH but need every write to be persistent. Disabling this would not hurt too much. It's really not recommend "Enable advanced performance" or
"Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device" on a system where you value uptime or require data integrity.
Best Regards,
Elaine
Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected]

Once USB disk sleeps, gone for good.

When my Lacie 500 GB USB 2 disk sleeps (and sometimes even when it doesn't), it becomes unavailable to the network. It is plugged into the USB port of the AEBS via a powered Keyspan 2.0 hub.
Most of the time it works fine, mounting automatically on my MacBook and/or manually on my G4 iMac, but sometimes the green light on the hub goes out (sometimes not) and the disk is no longer available. Time interval before this happens is very random, but if the disk is mounted and in use it stays that way with no glitches. It's only when things are inactive that it tends to disappear, though if it has been working it also usually remounts just fine after the MacBook sleeps. I have checked for firmware updates for the Lacie (none) and have all the latest updates on the other hardware (both Macs running 10.4.11).
When it's "gone," it won't show up in Airdisk Utility or the menu or via the Go-->Connect to server menu. Sometimes unplugging the AC power for the hub and re-powering brings it back. If that fails, then unplugging and reconnecting the Lacie's USB cable sometimes works. Last resort, which always works, is power-cycling the drive itself.
When I look in the AEBS logs, it often shows "USB disk unplugged" when the disk has disappeared.
Any thoughts/advice?
-dan

No luck, but thanks for a very good diagnostic suggestion.
With the disk plugged directly into the AEBS USB port, it slept and dropped off the network. Plugging it into the hub did not revive it; it took a power-cycle of the drive.
Are your drives partitioned?
-dan

Disk Sleep times not accurate

Not wanting my external drives to spin down every ten minutes (actually eight minutes), I reset the the disk sleep interval with the sudo pmset command or with TextWrangler. Oddly enough, I found that this works but is not accurate. Setting the time for 30 minutes would allow my disks to spin down after only 23 minutes. At a 60 minute setting, they would spin down in about 44 minutes. They seem to spin down anywhere from 70% to 80% of the value set. Has anyone else experienced this? Anyone know why?

Not wanting my external drives to spin down every ten minutes (actually eight minutes), I reset the the disk sleep interval with the sudo pmset command or with TextWrangler. Oddly enough, I found that this works but is not accurate. Setting the time for 30 minutes would allow my disks to spin down after only 23 minutes. At a 60 minute setting, they would spin down in about 44 minutes. They seem to spin down anywhere from 70% to 80% of the value set. Has anyone else experienced this? Anyone know why?

External Hard Disks Sleep after 10.8.5 update

After installing the latest Apple update to Mtn Lion, my external disks sleep and cannot be awakened via remote access. Nothing changed except the update.
It happened at work as well as on my home network.

I am on a Mac Pro 2.8 (3.1) 2008 model. 12 Gb ram and a radeon 5870. This supplemental update has been pretty horrible. I have had the following issues: messed up sleep, random wake ups, and one hard crash. I have also had the long sleep delay where the fans crank up and it takes forever to sleep...only a restart cures this, which is pretty useless. The mach file showing but that was fixed with a terminal command. Lost video chat icon on iMessage for a while but that has now mysteriously returned. The last annoying bug I have suffered with is what seems like horribly reduced audio quality out of the Apple LED 24 inch cinema display speakers. It sounds like 22kz mono both input and output.
I would rate this update a full on zero out of ten, for creating problems that never existed in 10.8.5.

Setting Disk Sleep Timers problems with FCP4.5?

Still experiencing trouble when Printing-To-Tape projects that are over 30 min in length. It usually stops at around 26 minutes. I head something about Disk Sleep Timers. I checked my Mac under About This Mac>More Info>Power...I found that my Disk Sleep Timer is set to 10 minutes and System Sleep Timer is set to 180 minutes. Could this be the problem? Should I reset my Disk Sleep Timer to a longer time? If so, how can I do this?
Also, other mentioned something about Journaling on the disks? What is that? Should they be on or off? How can I check. Please help.

Luis,
You will want to set your sleep to never, screen savers to None, and disk spindown to never.
This is a way to set the disks to never:
In Terminal type:
sudo pmset spindown x
then type your pass word
x=the number of minutes that you want till your drive spins down.
0 is 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
Do a command f and search for "pmset" that is where i first found this.
Note that this is a more 'controlled' way of Putting the hard disk to sleep than possible in
system preferences>energy saver>sleep>Put the hard disk to sleep when possible
In that situation, checked means x=10 and unchecked means, not 0 but 180 minutes.
Also, there are some utilities with a graphical interface that will do this as well.
Good luck.
x

I want to change the disk sleep time

I want to change the disk sleep time

The OSX controls the HDD. In System Preferences>Energy Saver you do have this option:
Ciao.

Adjusting Hard Disk Sleep?

Is there a way to adjust the default time when I've enabled "put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible"? The default time seems very short to me, and would love to extend it to a half hour or so before they go to sleep.
Thanks!

yes, it's possible. install TextWrangler and open the file /library/preferences/systemconfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist in textWrangler. change the entry for Disk Sleep Timer from 10 to 30 and save. you'll have to provide your admin password. then restart and the disk sleep timer will be set to 30 minutes. you can adjust that number to whatever you want of course.

Itunes: An unknown error occurred (-50): external disk sleeping

Hi All.
I posted this question about a year ago, but never got a usable answer. However, now I have more info, and thought I'd give it another try.
I have an external disk that I attach via USB to my iMac running OS X 10.6.8, which is left on almost all the time. When I don't use the computer for an extended period, despite having the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" unchecked in the Energy Saver system preferences, the disk in the external array spin down anyway.
Most of the time, when I return to the computer, the disks spin up just fine and there's no issue.
However, sometimes, when I return, I'll find the disk that was normally read/write is now available, but read only, and messages such as the following are in the console log:
     7/13/11 4:33:42 PM          kernel          disk3s2: I/O error.     7/13/11 4:33:42 PM          kernel      7/13/11 4:33:42 PM          kernel      7/13/11 4:33:42 PM          kernel          jnl: disk3s2: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x5     7/13/11 4:33:42 PM          kernel          jnl: disk3s2: write_journal_header: error writing the journal header!     7/13/11 4:33:48 PM          kernel          disk3s2: I/O error.     7/13/11 4:33:48 PM          kernel      7/13/11 4:33:48 PM          kernel      7/13/11 4:33:48 PM          kernel          jnl: disk3s2: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x5     7/13/11 4:33:48 PM          kernel          jnl: disk3s2: end_transaction: only wrote 0 of 12288 bytes to the journal!
The disk has my iTunes library on it, and iTunes complains "An unknown error occurred (-50)".
If I eject this 3Tb disk from the system and then use either 'Disk Utility' or 'diskutil' to mount it, it comes back up just fine.
My question is, is there a way to use the 'remount option on the mount command to fix this? If I try, I get
     # mount -o remount,rw /dev/disk3s2 /Volumes/Audio4TbRaid0     mount: -o remount: option not supported     #
If not the mount command, is there some hidden option to 'diskutil' that will do this without having to unmount the drive first (and cause all the open windows into the drive to go away)?
Thanks in advance for any help.

Just an update to this: It's definitely a problem with external (USB 2 connected) drives that go into sleep mode. When they spin up, they sometimes are in read only mode.
Unmouting them and mounting them again restores normal operations.
Annoying? You bet. Workaround? Yeah, I guess...

Safe to turn off hard disk sleep?

i have a powermac g4 with mirror drive doors. i've been having occasional trouble waking from sleep. i turned off sleep mode for the computer, and unchecked "put the hard disk to sleep when possible". is this safe for my computer, or will it harm the hard disk?

If I had a nickel for every "sleep" related question I wouldn't have to work for a living.
Your hard drives are, as David says, fully capable of running all the time. Some swear that it is better for the drives. My belief is that this comes from the experience of older hard drives which were best left on all the time. Newer drives are designed to power down as required by the EnergyStar mandates. So they can run or sleep and it really shouldn't matter.
What does matter is the not waking from sleep. If by that you mean you had to use the power button to shut down completely and then restart your computer acutally crashed. If/when this happens you should do one of the following upon or before attempting to restart
1) Boot single user and run fsck
2) Boot from the install disk and run Disk Utility from the cd/dvd
3) Hold down the shift key for a Safe Boot which also runs fsck before booting fully
The chances are that the directory was ok when the computer entered sleep and the journal of the hard drived was up to date. But if not then repeated hard reboots will accumulate directory errors which will mess things up.

MacBook Pro Retina and Hard Disk Sleep

I have noticed in the Energy Saver in the System Preferences section, that their is a Put Hard Disk to sleep when possible, but I know that my laptop is an SSD and not a hard drive. Is this something I should uncheck or leave checked?
Thanks!

You can leave it as it is now. That option also applies to the SSD, although you see hard disks

After Effects CS6 - huge Disk Cache?

Hello,
Looked around on various adobe discussions/forums - so far can't find an answer to this.
I've just upgraded to AEFX CS6. AEFX gave me a warning about insufficient cache size on my drive - upon looking, I've seen my disk cache (users/library/prefs/adobe/after effects) has swollen up to 80 GB for a current project.
I am also using CS5 for the same project and the cache folder is a measly 4MB.
Any solutions? Why the difference between CS5 / CS6 in handling cache?
I suppose I can delete the cached files (via finder) but despite not having access to these files, is there any down side?
Thanks in advance.
D

The cache is "persistent" in CS6, so older cache files are not overwritten as long as they remain valid. And since CS6 tries to cache literally everything, not just the comp you currently work on, it produces a lot more data for pre-comps or layers with effects. If you don't want it to grow that big, simpyl set a smaller size in the prefs or turn off the disk cache entirely.
Mylenium

Hard Disk Sleep Delay Time

Is there a tweak out there somewhere where I can set the amount of time before my external disks go to sleep? The 5 minute delay is way too short and it's driving me crazy when I use the Finder.

Hi, B.
See my "Spinning Beach Ball Of Death (SBBOD)" FAQ, specifically the section entitled "SBBOD spins for 30-35 seconds. You may hear your hard drives spinning up." Depending on the firmware of your external drives' enclosures, there may be no way to change how it responds to Energy Saver preferences.
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.

MacPro3,1 internal disk sleep problem

My Early 2008 Mac Pro has 4 internal drives installed and a fresh install of SL.
Two 1TB drives are in a mirrored Apple software RAID configuration.
They like to go to sleep. A lot. I'm tired of waiting for them to spin up.
The "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" box is unchecked.
The "Computer sleep" slider is at 1 hr.
The S.M.A.R.T. status of all drives is verified and OK.
Any idea how to keep these drives from sleeping while the rest of the computer is awake?
Message was edited by: the_kais

uiii wrote:
CountDuckula wrote:So when you removed the internal drive from laptop was the dmesg output the same or similar as the one you posted?
Sorry, I don't know. I hevent tried to remove it nowadays. I'm not currently at home and I don't have proper equipment to remove the disk, I can try it when I'm at home (at weekends).
Yeah, might be an idea. If you removed it before and it was taking a long time to boot it could be that the BIOS might see there is no primary hard drive and start looking to the network for a pxe boot server - I had a Dell which did something similar. If you do remove the drive then I would also do a test by actually pressing the F12 key at boot and select your external drive directly to boot from, this way it should not do any timeouts and then check the dmesg outputs to see how they compare to your posted dmesg.
Last edited by CountDuckula (2010-12-01 00:01:09)

Change Thunderbolt Disk Sleep Time

Hi, so I have a new iMac with a LaCie d2 Thunderbolt being used with Time Machine. Since the LaCie is a little loud (in comparison with the super silent iMac), I want OS X to put it into standby mode sooner than it already does.
I know I should be able to just open terminal and use "pmset -a disksleep" to change this time (default 10, I'd probably make it 5), but to my understanding this is for all hard drives (external and internal). Is there anyway to specify this command to only external disks or, better yet, only time machine disks?
Finally, if there isn't a way to only set this for the external drive, would it cause any problem to just set disksleep to 5? I'd prefer I could just get my external to immediatly sleep once the backup is done, so maybe I could spend some time to write a script to do that, but I wouldn't know what to do.

The OSX controls the HDD. In System Preferences>Energy Saver you do have this option:
Ciao.

Effect of TM Disk Sleeping

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