Powermac won't go to sleep + HDs keep spinning up and down

mac_mark · Feb 4th, 2006, 01:50 PM

Hi!

I've been trying to figure out why my Powermac (2.3DC) won't go to sleep. In the power management settings I have the computer set to sleep after 1 hour. But it never seems to sleep.

I'm not sure if this is related, but the hard drives have a habit of spinning down, parking, and then starting up again a short while later. And this process repeats itself. I have the original WD 250gig + another identical drive in a RAID 0 configutation on the built-in SATA bus. I tried setting the hard drives to not go to sleep in the power management settings, but that doesn't seem to affect them either way

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Mark

AppleAuthority · Feb 4th, 2006, 04:13 PM

I'm not too familiar with RAID on the Mac, but generally if a Mac refuses to go to sleep something running in the background is holding it up. Try restarting the machine, and with no running apps, see if it goes to sleep. If it doesn't, open up /Utilities/Activity Monitor, and see what programs are taking the most CPU, and report back here.

MacDoc · Feb 4th, 2006, 04:48 PM

Yeah I've never been fond of Apple's sleep - always something.

If you manually put it to sleep does the same thing happen??

Personally for the health of the drives - don't sleep at all- just sleep the screen.

mac_mark · Feb 4th, 2006, 05:45 PM

If I manually put it to sleep it stays asleep.

I'm just finishing up some coding, so once that is done I can restart it and find out what programs are running from a fresh start. Would Adium or iChat keep the computer awake?

I have it set to keep the hard drives running all the time, but I still hear them wind down, make a click, and then a few minues later spin up. It's probably not the best thing for the life of the HDs. Thank goodness I have my critical info backed up, I can just feel a crash coming one of these days.

MacDoc · Feb 4th, 2006, 08:25 PM

Do you have Smart Reporter - you may indeed have a hardware issue.

I really don't like Apple's auto sleep - seems okay manually - why is different on auto