Is sleep mode always this finicky?

just use this setting. you save less then 75 cents a month if you put it to sleep .

I have done many tests with kill a watt meter. my sleep setting pulls 6 watts an hour or about 150 watts a day. a full sleep setting pulls 1.5 watts an hour so you save 4.5 watts an hour or 108 watts a day. so if my machine is on half sleep and your machine is on full sleep an entire month non stop at a difference of 108 watts a day. that is a 3240 watt savings. or 3.240 kilo watts .

3.240 k watts is about 75 cents a month.

that savings achieved is only if the machines sleep 24hours 7days a week. so for less then 75 cents a month your are driving yourself crazy.

Also more often then not most machine runs 4 or more hours each day. So the 75 cents savings is reduced to less then 60 or even under 30 cents if the machine sees a lot of use.



setting your drives to shut off at every possible chance they get will cost time and money as it wears the drives out from stop and start action. Plus you have to wait for spin up.

Do you have the external drive formatted correctly? There should be no compatibility issues if it's formatted HFS+ Journaled.

LincolnsiPod said:

All this because of the sleep function.

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There is something else going on. I have a Mac mini with four external drives (two of them Western Digital) and have never experienced any of the problems that you describe.

A.

LincolnsiPod said:

Are these drives designed for the Mac or the usual external hard drives Western Digital offers?

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Any external drive will work with Apple computers as long as they have a USB 2, FireWire or thunderbolt connection. USB 3 drives will work too, but only at USB 2 speeds since its backwards compatible. What problems exactly are you experiencing?

You shouldn't have any trouble with the drive but:

If it's formatted as NTFS and you're using NTFG-3G (the free version, not Tuxera) to be able to write to it, I've had some problems with the latest version.

Also, if the drive is one of WD's USB 3 drives, there may be a firmware update for it.

EDIT: Seems the new firmware updater (v3.1.0.10 Oct 2011) now supports all USB chipsets in recent drives and updates USB2.0 and USB3 drives. There are firmware updates for other drives too (some of which require at least MacOS 10.5). /edit

Plus, even WD's non-Mac drives come shipped with their own USB driver which they say improves USB transfer speeds over Apple's own USB disk driver. I've never installed it, but it may be a cause.

(Look for WDUSB_64HPDriver.kext, WDUSBHPDriver.kext, WD1394HPDriver.kext, and WD1394_64HPDriver.kext in System/Library/Extensions/)

Lastly, if there is a USB Hub inbetween the Mini and the Hard Drive, try eliminating that.

Not saying any of these is your problem, just the first ones that come to mind with recent WD retail external drives.

LincolnsiPod said:

Are these drives designed for the Mac or the usual external hard drives Western Digital offers?

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These are various drives, some advertised for the Mac and some not.

A.

LincolnsiPod said:

Ok, mine is ANCIENT, an 80GB MyBook drive that's probably at least 4 years old. It's been formatted for Mac now, but I haven't tried putting it to sleep yet to see how it reacts to waking up, still have issues with the monitor that I need to deal with first.

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What's the model number?

WD800C032, WDG1U800 ?

philipma1957 said:

just use this setting. you save less then 75 cents a month if you put it to sleep .

I have done many tests with kill a watt meter. my sleep setting pulls 6 watts an hour or about 150 watts a day. a full sleep setting pulls 1.5 watts an hour so you save 4.5 watts an hour or 108 watts a day. so if my machine is on half sleep and your machine is on full sleep an entire month non stop at a difference of 108 watts a day. that is a 3240 watt savings. or 3.240 kilo watts .

3.240 k watts is about 75 cents a month.

that savings achieved is only if the machines sleep 24hours 7days a week. so for less then 75 cents a month your are driving yourself crazy.

Also more often then not most machine runs 4 or more hours each day. So the 75 cents savings is reduced to less then 60 or even under 30 cents if the machine sees a lot of use.



setting your drives to shut off at every possible chance they get will cost time and money as it wears the drives out from stop and start action. Plus you have to wait for spin up.

Click to expand...

If you are setting your mac-mini to not sleep then I can't see the point of having "Wake for Network access" turned on.