Pioneer Blu-Ray Workaround Allows Enabled Drive Sleep

Question

The common workaround for Pioneer Blu-Ray drives that vanish is to disable Put hard disks to sleep in Energy Saver preferences.  Here is another workaround that seems to solve the problem while being able to put the rest of your hard disks to sleep when idle.
Normal drive sleep happens after 10 minutes of inactivity.  All that is needed to keep the Blu-Ray drive happy is to touch it in some way more often than 10 minutes.  This can be accomplished by using /usr/bin/drutil to get the status of the drive.  I've tested this with all combinations I can think of - tray open, tray closed and empty, blank disc present, reading from disc, burning disc, etc.
All that is needed is a LaunchDaemon that executes /usr/bin/drutil status every few minutes.  I've placed the following file called hack.blu-ray.plist into /Library/LaunchDaemons.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
          <key>Label</key>
          <string>hack.blu-ray</string>
          <key>ProgramArguments</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/usr/bin/drutil</string>
                    <string>status</string>
          </array>
          <key>StartInterval</key>
          <integer>180</integer>
          <key>KeepAlive</key>
          <false/>
</dict>
</plist>
Then either reboot or launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/hack.blu-ray.plist
This will run every 3 minutes.  Change the StartInterval for other values - must be less than Disk Sleep Timer in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

Answer 1

Sorry, I have not upgraded any of my machines to Yosemite yet.  It would be odd for this to stop working as it is just using Apple tools.
I suppose it is possible that they shortened the Disk Sleep Timer in Yosemite.  See the post above for the location of the relevant file to check.  If they changed it to something less than ~5 minutes then you can shorten the 180 above to something less.  If not, you could try running drutil status from within Terminal after you burn a disc to see if it produces an error.  If you are able to write scripts, you could replace running drutil status with your script - then you could do additional debugging from within your script.