Hard drive spins down and have to do a hard reboot

I have an Intel iMac 3.06 (April 2008). Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard especially when I am using itunes (9.02) (downloading) the hard drive spins down for no reason at all.The energy settings are fine. The only option I have is to hold the power button down for 5 sec and reboot when it happens. I know this has been an issue with other intel iMacs but when the "fix" for other machines was available it said my machine did not need it. I beg to differ. This is getting very annoying as I am sure it is not doing the hard drive any good having to hard reboot all the time.
I have tried the power management reset which has not resolved the problem.

Hi David
Welcome to Apple Discussions
1. In the Energy Saver preference try setting Computer sleep: to "Never" and make sure the the box "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is unchecked.
2. Try resetting the System Management Controller as described in the article below.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1543
Now then if you are still having a problem you might also:
1. Use the Restore Default button on the Energy Saver preference panel and then reselect your sleep settings.
or
2. Go to: Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences > SystemConfiguration and trash the "com.apple.PowerManagement.plist" which also restore's the Energy Saver preference to default, then go back to the Energy Saver preference and reselect your sleep settings.
Dennis

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External hard drive spinning down (and up) on it's own

I thought my 5 month old external 1tb dual drive was dying at first, but now am seeing a pattern. There is a forum over at macrumors about this. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=445690
I always make sure in my energy settings i have spin down external drives unchecked, because it's known that spin downs and ups can cause drives to fail sooner. Yet I now find my external drive spinning down whenever it's not in use while I'm sitting at my computer, and i hear it spin up at the most random times, even when i'm not using my computer. sometimes in the middle of the night. This did not happen in tiger.
It's connected by firewire 800. At first I thought it was time machine but others in the macrumors forum claim it isn't that. I almost think its network activity. I'm considering using an applescript to access the drive every 5 or ten minutes automatically yet not do anything just to see if this stops it from spinning it down. I do consider this an annoyance and would hope apple will figure out what it is very soon, before it causes any detriment to the life of my expensive drive.

did you ever find a fix for this?
my ext FW800 drives constantly spin down, then when i do something later i get the beachball until they spin back up

External drives spin down and up on their own??

Suddenly my external drives are acting very strange.
They go to sleep within 3 minutes??
This happens only a few minutes after the last time I access them.
I do not remember this happening prior to SL.
I did a fresh install a second time on a brand new system drive- and I still get this issue with my externals shutting down and having to spin up.
My FW800 take a long time to spin up and I get the beachball.
What is going on?

Perhaps a basic question but is "Sys Pref" - "Energy Saver" - "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible" enabled?
Perhaps try Topher's tip in this article (setting no spindown time via Terminal)?
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10346924-263.html
/p

Hard Drive Spin Down....Good or Bad??

'Two questions, really, but first some background. I have an earlier Mac Pro running 10.7.3 (as I recall). I also have a Sonos music system. All the hard drive bays in the Mac Pro are occupied. The first has a 2 TB Western Digital RE that has my OS and all my files on it. Bay's 2 and 3 have two 3TB drives from Hitachi which are mirrored and serve as my internal daily backup which is run and cloned by CCC. The fourth drive is another RE that has copies of all my music. I simply copy my two iTunes folders and any other music I want the Sonos system to access to this fourth drive. My reason for doing this is that I wanted to minimize the run time of my main hard drive as not so long ago, I had two Seagate drives go belly up on me. All the music on the fourth drive (that serves the Sonos system) comes from my main hard drive which is backed up to the two mirrored internal drives as well as a G-Technolgy mirrored external drive, so I'm not concerned with backing up the drive serving the Sonos system. So......
Question one is: Which is better for drives in general, to keep them spinning all the time, or to allow or force them to spin down if they aren't being accessed?
Question two is: If it is better to spin down a drive, how can I selectively spin down some drives and not others?
For instance, I'm thinking that it is better to spin drives down, then I'd like to be able to spin down drive #1 with my OS but not the Sonos drive because the Sonos system prefers that the drive not spin down or there are connection errors.
Thanks for all your answers and suggestions!

I understand the limitions of mirrored drives, but my main drive is not mirrored. What is mirrored are my backup drives. One daily backup onto mirrored drives in bay's 3 and 4 in the Mac Pro. And a less frequent backup on mirrored drives that are stored in a fireproof safe in the garage. Should my main, non-mirrored drive fail (hopefully it'll be a long time as it's an enterprise class drive), I've then got any one of four cloned drives to choose from. Of course, I would choose the most recent ones that are internal, but should something catastrophic like a fire occur, I'd then have two identical cloned and bootable drives in the garage.
I recognize that in the case of a real catastrophy, the drives in the garage won't be as current as the drives in the Mac Pro, but in both cases, the backups themselves are pretty robust because they are mirrored. If one backup drive fails, the other will likely be fine and I can then easily proceed from there.
It set up properly, mirrored drives offer some great redundency in case of hard drive failure. What prompted me to go this route was three drive failures in one year, all of which were Seagate Barracuda drives and relatively new. And two of them were backup drives. My backup drives are now Hitachi and mirrored in case one dies. And CCC makes it so I can just plug the backup drive into my #1 bay and I'm back up in business. Except for MS Office which somehow limits the number of times it can be cloned and you have to call MS and get a new product code. Easy to do, but a pain. I learned this as a result of swapping cloned drives in and out of my wife's MacBook. It all worked perfectly until I did it once too many times and MS wouldn't load. Hence the call to MS.
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my hard drive melted down and had to be replaced. I don't have my serial number or the email from it to reinstall my copy of Flash CS5.5. how do I get a new one? Can someone just verify my purchase and email me a new one?

Does your serial number show on your account page?
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Hard drive spin down - good or bad for the drives

Having had a few drives fail recently, I've started to wonder about the whole issue of the energy saver preference for having hard drives spin down. I've always had it disabled because it seems to be generally believed that that's the way to work on a fcp (or avid for that matter) editing system. But now that I've started imagining every drive failing, I'm wondering whether it makes sense to perhaps have another user account that I switch to for nonediting moments in which the spin down option is enabled.
Any opinions out there?

Drive manufacturors report a MTBF (mean time between failures) often in the 200,000 hours range. This works out to something like 22 years. Drives that fail in less time than that are often subjected to three things:
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- physical shocks
oh, and did I mention heat?
As drive RPM increases, so does energy consumption and heat. The best thing you can do for drives is to keep them in a cool, well ventilated location and to put them on a conditioned power supply.
FWIW, I have scsi drives that are over 10 years old running everyday with no issues.
Spindown seems to be an energy saver issue but I wonder about the cycle of powering down and back up over and over and over. It seems like that would put much more stress on bearings, motors and the like.
good luck.
x

Thunderbolt Drives won't spin down and sleep in Mountain Lion

In Lion when I put my iMac to sleep, the external Thunderbolt Drives would spin down and sleep as well. In Mountain Lion, when I put my iMac to sleep, the external Thunderbolt drives do NOT spin down and sleep. Can anyone confirm or duplicate this issue?

I have the same behavior, however I'm using the TB to FW800 adapter. I have 6 FW800 drives in a chain. All would sleep when MBP was put to sleep under 10.8.5 (ironically fixed after 10.8.4, now broken in 10.9).
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Every time i start my MacBook Air i get the spinning wheel and have to soft boot (shift, control, option, power) it three or four time s before it starts

Every time i start my MacBook Air i get the spinning wheel and have to soft boot (shift, control, option, power) it three or four time s before it starts. It has only been over the last week or so I also found Safari will not load up and tyou have too open then shut from the drop down then restart it to get a page, any help pleas?

Do this:
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PB17 internal drive spins down during bootup; computer shuts down

my internal hard drive has crashed 3 times in the last week, each time on boot-up during the grey screen spinning wheel mode. the wheel will stop spinning, and simultaneously i can hear the internal drive spin down, then the computer shuts down on its own. i am able to boot from any external bootable hard drive.
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If your drive happens to be failing, then there is nothing that any software application can do to fix it. Maybe you should boot from the Install & Restore DVD that came with your PowerBook holding down the Option key, and run Apple Hardware Test to see if that provides any insight....
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External Drives Spinning Down

Greetings All;
Although the upgrade to Mountain Lion went without a hitch on all of my machines, since the upgrade my external firewire drives spin down when not in use.
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Syd Rodocker
Apple iTunes U Administrator
Tennessee State Department of Education
Tennessee's Electronic Learning Center

Joe;
Thanks for the response! Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I have multiple FCP editing systems and a couple of iMac's for graphics work, so I've now begun only powering up the drives that I need for the day's current project. Interesting development. All the best...
Syd Rodocker
Apple iTunes U Administrator
Tennessee State Department of Education
Tennessee's Electronic Learning Center

My iMac locks up constantly in email. I click on one or two emails. Then when I click on another email, I get the spinning wheel and have to relaunch. Why does it get confused and lock up?

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i

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I want to disable my mac.com mail, I know how to delete it but I cannot get into mail to do this, whenever I click on mail, or mail in system preferences to open it I get the spinning wheel and have to force quit. I am running a Macbook 10.7.5
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I need to deauthorise a computer that has broken down and have already recently used my deauthorise all, what can I do?

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Lately, I've been getting a blue screen in the midst of working and have to do a cold reboot to end it. Seems to happen when I'm closing windows or quitting applications. Not always, but sporadically. What causes this? I'm using 10.6.8 on early 2011 MBP.

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Hard drive spins down and have to do a hard reboot

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