HD Sleep Problems

M

macavenger

Registered
I have been having some problems with Hard Drive sleep in OS X. I currently have my system set to shut off the monitor after five minutes, the Hard Drive after twenty, and the system never (so I can use the comp as an alarm clock). After I leave the computer for a while, the monitor will shut off and the hard drive will spin down, as expected (Although sometimes it appears that the HD is spinning down after somewhat less than twenty minutes). But then, about five minutes or so later, the HD will spin up again, remain up for about a minute, then spin back down again. This process will repeat every few (3-5 or so) minutes (which can't be good for the drive) indefinitly untill I get fed up and put the computer into a deep sleep. If I set the entire system to sleep after some length of time, it works fine, the problem only occurs if I set the system sleep time to never.

I have already tried running ps -ax as root, and killing off any processes that I can recognize as being not totally neccesarry, and disabling all network protocols/interfaces, but the problem persists. Anyone know of something else I can try or how to fix this?
 
You are not alone.

The issue is not why the system needs to spin up the HD, it could need to do so for any number of reasons. Thu issue is that it doesn't reset the sleep timer for the HD.

I have 3 drives, and they are all set to sleep after 60 minutes. Not that I can set them separately in OS X. :) But I'll often have 5 or so HD spin ups within an hour of usage. Under no circumstances should this happen. If the wake up they should be up for 60 minutes minimum, longer if used again.

I don't understand it, and with the retarded Finder, it's a real issue. At least I have 2 CPU's, so one of them is still free despite the other thinking REALLY hard about waking up a HD. System still responds, even though the Finder waits for the HD before it registers so much as another click.

Also, (although it hasn't done this recently) I have a software RAID set, and it sometimes spins the drives up sequentially before it will use them. wake one, wait till it's up to speed then wake the other. Dear Heaven, it's like 12 seconds I'm sitting there watching the CPU Meter.

As for why it's waking, UNIX has a tendency to sync every 5 minutes or so to make sure its RAM caches of HD data are congruent with what's on the HD. A badly written sync, or a log file entry would be reason enough for the drive to wake up. That's pure conjecture though.
 
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