iMac external drive continually spinning down
I recently purchased a New iMac (M1 chip 2021) running Big Sur. I have two external drives connected to it. These external drives are the drives I primarily work off of due to storage limitations of the internal hard drive.
The problem I'm having is that the drives continually spin down when connected - basically after 1-2 minutes of "inactivity". This makes it impossible to work on programs like After Effects or Adobe Audition without having to stop and wait for the drives to spin up every 1-2 minutes. This is not a case of the drives going to sleep after an hour of inactivity - it happens within minutes - even while working in the programs.
I went into the Preferences pane and unchecked "put hard disk to sleep when possible" option and I also checked "prevent hard disks from sleeping automatically when the display is off." Also this was not an issue with the previous computer a 2013 MacPro desktop.
Has anyone else had this issue? Is there a setting somewhere that I'm missing which will keep the drives spinning for longer?
Any help is greatly appreciated!