Sleep wonky?

[R Bygrave]

A wise chap on the LJ community for Mac knew the answer immediately, I think:

If it's FW 400 then USB 2 would be just as fast if not faster. The USB bus is handled slightly differently in sleep mode than FW since the mac listens for KM input. I say just use USB 2 on the mac and see if that solves it.

This fits the behaviour exactly: there was no sign of anything going actually wrong (AFAIK), but it was hideous frustrating to have to power down with the power button because the Mac would not re-awaken when I hit the keyboard or mouse.

Since the helpful chap says I'd get little or no benefit at all from the speed of using the FW, what I need to do is unscrew the bottom module, find the USB/eSata module which I think I put in a drawer because I had no immediate use for it, screw in the USB/eSata module and get on with life as normal.

I'll lose the immediate boot-from-backup, and I'll lose the spare FW port, but it's a lot more workable solution than the others I was thinking about. Unsurprisingly, I have not found where I put the module yet, but have little doubt it will fix the problem given the specifics the helpful chap knows about. I'll just have to remember never to let the machine sleep until I find where I put it...

This is, of course, Seagate's fault for not creating a FAQ or manual entry for this specific issue.