Jacken's Blog » macbook

Disk that refuses to sleep in Mac OS X – how to fix it

Jacken — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:29:28 +0000

Image by DigaoSPBR

I replace my internal disk on my MacBook Pro with a SSD disk, which made a huge difference in speed. At the same time I removed the DVD unit and installed a new 500gb disk instead. The extra disk went to sleep when not in use, but then started within a couple of minutes or less. Here’s what I did to fix that problem.

Finding out the culprit

First of all I needed to change the time before the disk went to sleep. I set the value before sleep to one minute, so I don’t have to wait long between tests.

sudo pmset -a disksleep 1

This will set the time until sleep to one minute when using an AC adapter. Replace -a with -b for changing the setting when on battery power.

To find the applications that was accessing the volume, I opened the terminal application and started to observe the output of the following terminal command. To narrow the output I use grep to just show events and access to the extra disk. Otherwise your going to get a LOT of unnecessary output.

sudo fsusage | grep nameofvolume

Replace nameofvolume with the name of your disk. Enter your login password. The first thing I noticed was that fseventsd was logging information to the external disk. To deactivate the logging, just enter the following:
cd /Volumes/name
ofdisk sudo touch .fseventsd/nolog

Interfering software

I continued to look for applications or processes that accessed my disk, and one of them was iStat Menu. I checked the settings for iStat Menu, and the disk info part was disabled, but it still accessed the disk. So I had to disabled it. I love iStat Menu, so that felt a bit sad, but until they fix this it will be turned off.

I have a lot of links for stuff like the download folder, Final Cut Pro settings, buffers for applications and all my photos on the extra disk so naturally the extra disk will start when using applications using these files. But now when I surf the web or write, I no longer have to listen to the sound of the disk. Blissful silence.

You can now change the time before the disk goes to sleep. My 7200rpm disk starts very quickly so I kept mine on a couple of minutes. Added benefit? Much better battery life!

I hope this helps you if you have the same problem.

Impromptu TimeMachine test

Jacken — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:24:29 +0000

When I’m depressed I have this thing of dreaming violent dreams and acting them out in reality. The other night I dreamt that I was at the liquor store and got in to a fight with two men. I woke up with a bang when I kicked my laptop of the table beside my bed, seeing it banging to the floor. The hard drive worked for about a day, and then gave up. So I had a good reason to test TimeMachine, and it has worked perfectly! So now I’m up and running again with more free space on my computer than the old total disk space. It even seems a bit faster because this disk i 7200 RPM. 320 mb in a 2.5″. I remember the first hard drive I used. It was a Corvus 5 megabyte drive for the Apple II in the size of a small refrigerator. I think it’s swedish price was something like $8000. Yet a big upgrade from my first “real” storage device (not counting cassette player) wich was a dual 5 1/4 floppy at a wopping 140kb per disk (yes kids, that’s 140 KILOBYTES!) And those where real floppys, because, well, they where physically floppy.

Mac OS X 10.5.2 hangs on wake from sleep

Jacken — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:33:45 +0000

I have had this annoying problem with my Macbook Pro. Sometimes when waking the machine from sleep, the machine can not connect to the selected Airport network and then hangs with spinning pizza of death.

Apples next update to 10.5.3 looks like it will fix it. Hopfully Apple will release it soon…

From Fixed list of Mac OS X update 10.5.3 - Joining AirPort network after wake issue resolved