MBP 10.9.4 Ignoring HD spindown times - confused!

Hello all, this is my first post in this forum.

A little backstory...

I'm a dj and run two identical MD103LL/A MBP's. i recently pulled my superdrives and replaced them with 2 identical WD Mainstream Classique 500GB 5400rpm drives. I believe these to be the same drive as the Blue series. They store all of my DJ music and a little extra data for storage.

One of my computers seems to spindown my hard drives after about 90 seconds regardless of settings in OSX. for my dj purposes i really need the drives to remain spinning for at least 10 minutes (or never spindown at all if possible). i'm constantly waiting for my drive to spin back up to load music. i have tried the standard sysprefs power window, and have also given the pmset command in terminal. i have tried the -b and -a flags as well. i have also reset PRAM and SMC. i have even switched out the ext hard drive to a brand new one with the same results. the only difference between the computers is the one with the issues has 16gb of ram and was upgraded to 10.9.4 from mountain lion, while the other (issue-less) computer has 4gb of ram and had mavericks installed on a clean slate.

i have searched a few forums and so far i've only found people who've had the exact opposite problem - that their drives will never spin down. i'd love this issue!

any ideas? i'm all ears.

thanks!

Yeah, this has been a problem for some folks. I suggest instead of doing battle with the machine that's spinning the HDD down, make a full backup using Time Machine, erase and reinstall clean. Restore from Time Machine.

If you have the time, you can first try creating a new account on the machine that's giving you problems. Log on to the new account and test the HDD. You can also try booting the machine to Safe boot mode and test the HDD.

chscag said:

Yeah, this has been a problem for some folks. I suggest instead of doing battle with the machine that's spinning the HDD down, make a full backup using Time Machine, erase and reinstall clean. Restore from Time Machine.

If you have the time, you can first try creating a new account on the machine that's giving you problems. Log on to the new account and test the HDD. You can also try booting the machine to Safe boot mode and test the HDD.

Click to expand...

much appreciated! it is a relief to hear that others are having this issue. i will try safe mode, a new user profile, and then reformatting. i appreciate the quick response!

by any chance have you heard from others if this is a mavericks thing, or completely independent of any version of OSX?

It's independent of OS X version. We've been hearing about this for quite awhile, and it varies. Sometimes the drive will not spin up; not spin down; not go to sleep when the Mac is sleeping, not wake up, etc. And it seems that it's not isolated to one brand of HDD.

There is one sure cure, but it's going to cost you some bucks: Swap those spinning hard drives for SSDs.

chscag said:

There is one sure cure, but it's going to cost you some bucks: Swap those spinning hard drives for SSDs.

Click to expand...

That was actually a question of mine! Obviously there is no spindown associated with an SSD, but i wonder if OSX or any other OS will have a need to power down an SSD in some way to save power?

I considered going SSD, but i really need 500GB minimum of storage space for my music, and as i understand it, the fuller an SSD is, the slower it becomes. I'm also not sure how cost effective 2 500GB SSD's are for my situation.

went for the gold and reformatted. didn't even bother with time machine or anything like that as there is not much on this computer. wiped clean, new partition, brand new 10.9.4 via usb stick. same issue.

any other ideas? i'm considering going back to mountain lion for now.

any other ideas? i'm considering going back to mountain lion for now.

Click to expand...

No other ideas other than switching out those drives for large SSDs. But like I stated before, that can get expensive. You might want to take a look at pricing some 480 GB SSDs to see if you can pick one or two up. Since it's your DJ business we're talking about, it might be worth it.

As far as moving backward to ML, you can give that a try on the machine that's giving you problems with the drive spinning down. Won't hurt at this stage since you already wiped the drive and reinstalled.

i think i've found a (rather crude) solution.

i did a quick search and found a very small program, happily named 'keep drive spinning.'

it's basically a timer that touches the hard drive every 60 seconds or so. works for me.

for anybody interested, or if google has brought them here looking for a solution, here's a link:

Keep Drive Spinning for Mac | MacUpdate