Strange lights?

[ScanPro]

I noticed this about 3 days ago, it should be asleep. No one has awakened it, yet I still get these flashing lights, they last near an hour after the system goes to sleep. In the past the lights would flash for about 5 seconds, then sleepy time. Any ideas? Latest OS, M4 pro, stock system.

 

[eSaF-Eddie]

Hi, by my observation the LED light on the Mini is steady indicating normal operation, whereas the connected peripherals are the ones with the strange flashing lights.

I would hazard a guess and throw this out there, could it be too high of a power draw from the Mini port/ports??!!
I would start by disconnecting one by one the non critical ones to test if the problem is resolved.

Hope you find the solution.
Cheers.

 

[tonmischa]

I have also seen this behaviour. At my company, we use iLoks for licence management. iLoks are essentially encrypted USB sticks that can only be accessed with proprietary software and can only store licence files. They also have blue LEDs. Most of them are connected to the Mac via a powered USB 2.0 Hub.
Whenever the Mac is awake, the LEDs shine steadily; whenever the Mac is sleeping, the LEDs flash (a little quicker than in your video).
I have never experienced any problems with this behaviour, so I have come to ignore it.
I have seen this happen on both Intel Macs (2013 Mac Pro and 2018 Mac Mini) and Apple Silicon Macs (Mac Studio M1 and M2).

 

[ScanPro]

The 2 OWC TB5 docks are plugged into 2 of the TB 5 ports, one dock runs the dual SSD enclosure for the Time Machine and another for the Media, it also runs the DVD player. The other dock has 2 NVMe drives attached. The only draw on the Mini is the OWC 4 Tb boot drive. Today I can home and it was all good, no flashing. I havn't noticed any unusual behavior for performance. Im will keep an eye on it. Thanks for the replies.

 

[FatLouie]

Dude....that is extraterrestrial communications! You could probably use binary math to decode it. 🙂

 

[ScanPro]

Dude....that is extraterrestrial communications! You could probably use binary math to decode it.

I have decoded it. I says I need to do some serious work hiding all the wires.

 

[sublunar]

Interesting that Intel Macs and Mac Studios do this too according to @tonmischa - it's all part of the sleep/wake issues that minis generally seem to have then?

 

[ScanPro]

OK. So, I received an iPod Mini as a gift, works fine, sounds good for the size. I want to try Siri to see if I was able to play music using Siri. So to get Siri, I had to run on the internal SSD, no problem. reboot, update, move a few files and apps. Turn on Siri, well She/it can't see my music playlists, that's all I really wanted, just play a requested song. But that's what this thread is about is it. The strange flashing light have gone away. When I boot from the internal drive all is fine and dandy. Boot from the external drive and the light begin to send binary code. I have the same screen saver set up for both. The internal system sleeps like a baby, the external seems to fight like a newborn who doesn't know they are tired. Things like this bug me, the wife says "no data loss, no issues"