External Storage and 2012 Mac Mini Sleeping Issues

I have two external drives always connected and my Mini has no problems at all with sleep.

It actually sleeps when I don't want it to (due to Mountain Lion… DOH). Here's where terminal's command 'caffeinate' comes in handy.

As above, I also have the opposite problem. My narcoleptic mini wants to nod off during handbrake encodes, and even puts external HD's to sleep in the middle of file transfers.

albert1028 said:

That's good to know if others are not having these issues as well. I wonder what externals you have as in what type of USB chipset is connected. Is this on a 2012 mini?

Click to expand...

Yes, 2012 Mini. A 1TB FW800 iomega drive and a 1TB USB2.0 Toshiba one.

pup said:

As above, I also have the opposite problem. My narcoleptic mini wants to nod off during handbrake encodes, and even puts external HD's to sleep in the middle of file transfers.

Click to expand...

Option 1 is to disable sleep, which I don't like.
Option 2 is to open terminal and type:

$ caffeinate -t number

Where number is a number of seconds. If you estimate the Handbrake is gonna take for lets say 7 hours. Just type:

$ caffeinate -t 25200

It'll stay away for 7 hours. Then will go to sleep as normal.

Thanks. I actually downloaded the caffeine app after I discovered the problem. Hopefully it won't be an issue from here on.