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jay3ld · May 3, 2009, 08:38 PM

Has anyone else experienced issues with Password protected Screensaves and external drives?

It seems like sometimes, if I leave my mac of a while, enough time for the display to fall asleep and my external drive to spin down. That when I return, it takes a while (10 seconds) for it to bring up the password prompt window.
The whole time during this I can see the display has came back (it changes from dark black to lit black and I can hear my external drive start to spin up. After it fully spins up, I finally get the prompt for my password.

This is sort of annoying, I can't understand why it needs to spin up the drives, just to provide me with a simple password prompt box.

cwkmacuser · May 3, 2009, 09:03 PM

Hmm, don't know that one. Perhaps someone who has used an external hard drive before!

AKcrab · May 3, 2009, 09:14 PM

Originally Posted by cwkmacuser

Hmm, don't know that one. Perhaps someone who has used an external hard drive before!

Don't come crying here when you lose all your data. Or maybe you back up to DVD's..

jay3ld · May 3, 2009, 09:38 PM

Originally Posted by cwkmacuser

Hmm, don't know that one. Perhaps someone who has used an external hard drive before!

Why did you even post then?

cwkmacuser · May 3, 2009, 09:45 PM

Follow the rules in your own sig

Nothing better to do! I don't know, just for the heck of it.

gradient · May 3, 2009, 11:18 PM

Originally Posted by jay3ld

Why did you even post then?

Trying to improve his post count? Kinda like me, right now. Heh.

cwkmacuser · May 4, 2009, 12:37 AM

Yeah, my post count rises AMAZINGLY fast. Mostly because of those BIG threads that I start in the lounge.

JKT · May 4, 2009, 05:02 AM

It is normal behaviour - unfortunately, non-solid state drives need to spin up to speed before they are usable and this takes a few seconds or so. The same thing will happen for Open/Save dialogues if your external is asleep when you activate one.

When you wake your Mac, it isn't just having to display the password prompt - it is also reconnecting to your network and performing sanity checks, which I assume includes ones on the condition of your hard drives and whether they are usable or not.

OreoCookie · May 4, 2009, 05:13 AM

You can disable spin-down for external harddrives in the Energy Saver preferences. It's a global setting, mind you, so you disable spin-down for all harddrives that support it.

cwkmacuser · May 4, 2009, 08:41 AM

That's cool, Oreo.

ibook_steve · May 4, 2009, 12:33 PM

My MBP takes a while to display the unlock dialog whether or not I have have external drives connected. This is the screen saver or wake from sleep unlock dialog you can enable in the Security preferences. Sometimes, for no reason at all, the dialog does not appear for like 15 to 20 seconds or more. Even when it appears, I sometimes have to manually click in the Password field to start typing in my password. It's always done this. I don't know if it's normal or if it is related to something else, but it is really annoying.

Steve

JKT · May 4, 2009, 01:49 PM

That is probably because rather than just sleeping these days, Macs "hibernate" by default (i.e. they write the content of their RAM to the hard drive before sleeping) so that recovery after a power failure or your battery dying on you is possible. Unfortunately, this means that if you have a lot of RAM installed and it is all being used, you will now wait longer for your Mac to both go to sleep and to wake-up.

jay3ld · May 4, 2009, 02:51 PM

Originally Posted by JKT

It is normal behaviour - unfortunately, non-solid state drives need to spin up to speed before they are usable and this takes a few seconds or so. The same thing will happen for Open/Save dialogues if your external is asleep when you activate one.

When you wake your Mac, it isn't just having to display the password prompt - it is also reconnecting to your network and performing sanity checks, which I assume includes ones on the condition of your hard drives and whether they are usable or not.

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

You can disable spin-down for external harddrives in the Energy Saver preferences. It's a global setting, mind you, so you disable spin-down for all harddrives that support it.

Thanks for the info, I figured that was going on. Although I don't understand why it can't just show me the prompt, while spinning the drives and doing the checks. Would make much more sense. I would rather get an error half way through typing my password or when hitting login than taking 10-15 seconds to display it.

My macbook hard drive is always running thanks to a little app called declunk. That spin down bothered me a lot so I set that up on my main drive. It seemed to spin up and spin down so often. My external drives don't do it as often so I haven't done it to t hem.
As for my external drive, I would rather it spin down after its done. It only spins up and down for time machine backups. I rarely access the 100 gb of storage space I setup on it. I leave that for stuff I don't need on my computer but want to keep around.

Originally Posted by JKT

That is probably because rather than just sleeping these days, Macs "hibernate" by default (i.e. they write the content of their RAM to the hard drive before sleeping) so that recovery after a power failure or your battery dying on you is possible. Unfortunately, this means that if you have a lot of RAM installed and it is all being used, you will now wait longer for your Mac to both go to sleep and to wake-up.

That can't be 100% true, or I don't walk away from it long enough. I maintain a constant IRC connection while my macbook is awake (lid open). I don't see any notices that I pinged out or anything. So it is not hibernating.

ibook_steve · May 4, 2009, 03:37 PM

Originally Posted by JKT

That is probably because rather than just sleeping these days, Macs "hibernate" by default (i.e. they write the content of their RAM to the hard drive before sleeping) so that recovery after a power failure or your battery dying on you is possible. Unfortunately, this means that if you have a lot of RAM installed and it is all being used, you will now wait longer for your Mac to both go to sleep and to wake-up.

This isn't true for me because I use SmartSleep, which does a true sleep, not hibernation, if the battery has more than 20% capacity.

Steve

Simon · May 4, 2009, 03:58 PM

You can also just turn safe sleep off entirely.

Open the Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities/) and enter the following command:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
then hit return.
You can then select "Go to Folder" under the "Go" menu in the Finder, and enter: /private/var/vm then press return, and drag the file sleepimage to the Trash.
In order to re-enable Safe Sleep, use the command:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3
in the Terminal.

Art Vandelay · May 4, 2009, 05:29 PM

One thing that could be causing the authentication window delay is lack of memory. If you're already under heavy memory use, loading the authentication window can induce more swapping producing a noticeable delay. Check your memory stats the next time you see a wait.

ibook_steve · May 4, 2009, 06:59 PM

Originally Posted by Art Vandelay

One thing that could be causing the authentication window delay is lack of memory. If you're already under heavy memory use, loading the authentication window can induce more swapping producing a noticeable delay. Check your memory stats the next time you see a wait.

Interesting. I have a 2.33 GHz MBP that is limited to 3 GB (and I'm maxed at that). I have 1 GB allocated to Parallels, so that really only leaves me with 2 GB for everything else. I usually have at least 5 to 10 other programs open including Microsoft Hog...I mean Microsoft Office 2008 apps.

Unfortunately, there's no way to check memory stats until I succeed in entering the password, so I wouldn't be able to see if that was the problem while it was occurring.

Steve

Art Vandelay · May 5, 2009, 12:11 AM

You can still see your memory stats after. It's not going to change much.

Simon · May 5, 2009, 02:30 AM

Umm, how much memory would displaying an authentication panel require?

JKT · May 5, 2009, 08:59 AM

Does it matter? If RAM needs to be swapped to display it, then it won't really matter how much or how little it needs as you will still suffer the same spin-up delay as the vm is accessed and written-to on your disk.

Art Vandelay · May 5, 2009, 11:23 AM

Exactly. If you're heavily swapping, anything that's not in real memory will take longer no matter how small.

Simon · May 5, 2009, 11:59 AM

Yes it matters to me because I'm curious. What's with the attitude?

jay3ld · May 6, 2009, 03:02 PM

I highly doubt its RAM. I use iStats and I have more applications open than I usually do. Right now I have
Wired: 251MB
Active: 712MB
Inactive: 28MB
Free: 1.2GB

This is a 2.2 core 2 duo with 2 gb ram (667 mhz ddr2 sdram).

Even when backups start up, my overall cpu usage doesn't go above 10% most of the time. Although it has at times, this appears to be the weekly or monthly backups.

Simon · May 7, 2009, 01:49 AM

Just what I thought. With 1.2 GB of free RAM the lag certainly has nothing to do with swapping.

Art Vandelay · May 7, 2009, 11:59 AM

I wasn't referring to the OP, I was referring to Steve's delay. And I said it was a possibility, not a definite cause. Chill out.