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My setup has everything plugged into power bar/conditioners. I turn on the power and all the peripherals power up, and then I push the power button on the Mac. When done, I "Shut Down" the Mac, and when it goes dark, turn the power off on the power bars. This always worked fine.

Recently I noticed, after going to HS, after the computer has shut down, if I wait 2-3 seconds, a FW external drive starts spinning for a few seconds, and then shuts off. I've started waiting for that operation to complete before turning all power off, and now, startup is much faster.

I'm pretty sure this never happened before HS. Perhaps it is failing to tell FW devices that the party is over during its shutdown process. Anyway if you have FW externals and use HS, you might want to see if this is happening on your system.

Your setup is pretty close to mine, however I'm on a mid-2011 iMac. I never notice this with any of my drives. Could it be that Spotlight is accessing the drive? I have Spotlight disabled on all of my external drives. I also have disks to sleep when possible.

It’s the main audio drive that does this, so its exempt from spotlight. I dont have it spinning down because its where recordings go. Might be something related to Apple deprecating FW.