Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

This is still not fixed with macOS 12.6. Even with "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" disabled, and pmset showing a value of 0 for "disksleep", my drive is still spinning down, and up, and down every few minutes. It seems to be caused by putting the Mac to sleep. I'm able to reproduce the issue and workaround the issue via the following:

How to reproduce:

1. Boot your Mac with the external hard drive connected.
2. Allow 10-15 minutes for mdstores process to chill out as it likes to index the drive and perform maintenance when it sees it connected. Wait even longer if this hard drive is also your Time Machine backup destination. When the drive stops reading/writing then proceed.
3. Sleep your Mac. Wait 10-15 minutes.
4. Wake you Mac. Wait 10-15 minutes.
5. The hard drive will now start randomly spinning down when macOS thinks it's not needed and then 1-2 minutes later spin it back up again even though you aren't trying to access the drive.
6. Step 5 will repeat until you reboot the Mac.

How to workaround/avoid the issue:

1. Boot your Mac with the external hard drive connected.
2. Go to System Preferences > Battery > Power Adapter and check the box for "Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off.
3. When you are finished using your Mac, go to the Apple Menu and choose Lock Screen. Do not shut the lid.
4. When you want to use your Mac again, press any key and log in.
5. The external hard drive will remain active and will not spin down unless the system sleeps. Then it will get stuck in the loop mentioned in step 5 above until your Mac is rebooted.

If anyone could test and validate my findings, please respond with your results. If this is accurate and reproducible by others, then I think we have a good shot at trying to get this fixed by Apple. For those of us with Apple Care, opening a case and pointing the engineer to this thread would eliminate a lot of back and forth troubleshooting since most of the work is already done.

Thanks,

-Scott

Same here! Incredibly frustrating. I have just found a fix however, thanks to a member on another forum on the same topic so thought I'd share here too.

There's a free app on the app store called Amphetamine. Download that, go into the preferences>Drive Alive, make sure your HDD is plugged in and check the box. It's been working for me all morning.

Hope the issue gets fixed soon but this works for now!

After reading other articles and googling a lot I'm coming to the conclusion that this may not be an Apple bug but rather is associated with the actual drive type. I read in a few places (including in the link in my previous post) that the following could be true.

• Some disks are designed for continuous operation, some aren't. High end drives designed for use in NAS or server situations will not spin down unless done specifically, e.g. setting a disk sleep time using pmset (although I still doubt pmset work on external drives anyway).
• Lower class drives are put to sleep by the drives firmware and won't stay alive even if pmset is set to 0. In fact a sleep time of 0 doesn't mean "never sleep" it means "do nothing, no commands are sent to the drives regarding sleep periods" and the drives firmware will still put the drive to sleep if it not designed for continuous operation.
• Some drive manufacturers provide software to control the drive sleep (Seagate's Dashboard for example). These deal with the drive directly, not through any OS settings, suggesting that the drives firmware also has the ability to vary sleep times, or not sleep at all. See this link for instructions for Seagate GoFlex drives, but I understand it works on other Seagate drives too. https://www.seagate.com/sg/en/support/kb/freeagent-goflex-seagate-dashboard-utilities-adjust-drive-sleep-interval-214217en/ I would suggest that disksleep needs o be set at 0 to avoid the Apple OS interfering with any setting set by the Dashboard utility.

I've had some success with this theory, originally my Lacie 2Big Dock Thunderbolt 3 unit came with two Seagate Ironwolf drives (designed for NAS) but I'm no great fan of these and replaced them with WD Green drives (not high end or designed for NAS). The unit would sleep every 60 seconds, as is the subject of this thread. I have now put the Seagates back in the enclosure and, so far, after 48 hours they have not gone in to sleep mode. I have 2 other older Lacie units also connected to my Mac Studio, these also have more standard PC drives in them and they still sleep. If the enclosure with the Iron Wolf drives continues to stay awake I think I'll try newer, better disks designed for NAS in the other two enclosure too.

I'd be interested to hear what drives others here are using that are sleeping, this whole problem might just come down to drive type rather than some driver issue.

I'd like to add a big fat "me too" to this. I just upgraded from a 2011 iMac (running High Sierra) to a 2020 Mac Mini M1. (running Monterey) On the old iMac I had four external HDDs connected with a USB 2 hub. Yeah, slow ancient setup. But it always worked. Never had the problem described here. On the Mac Mini I have the same HDDs connected with a Sabrent powered 4-port USB 3.0 hub (connected to the USB port on the Mini). Everything was fine until the Mini went to sleep for the first time. Once the Mini woke up, the HDDs started spinning down after 30-60 seconds of inactivity. A restart of the Mini seems to fix the problem, until it sleeps and wakes up and the the problem starts again.

The Energy Saver "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" checkbox doesn't do anything. The only solution is to keep restarting the Mini every time it wakes up from sleep, or Amphetamine's "Drive Alive" feature seems to be working well (I just installed it today, but so far so good). Or I suppose I could just never let the Mini go to sleep, but that's hardly a good solution.

If it matters, all four HDDs are WD: Two Elements and two My Books. I don't use the WD software.

There are way too many people having this same problem for it to be blamed on a third party. This seems to be very much a Monterey problem.

If you are using amphetamine make sure you go into "Preferences" (not quick preferences), select the "Drive Alive" tab and add your external drives to the list (also click the check box so it is blue with a tick). That's working for me at the moment, still trying to get Apple to sensibly respond. I spoke with their tech support in the US and he was of the view it was a problem with the external drives and not the thunderbolt port driver included with the Monterey OS on Apple silicon. The fact that it is happening to any drive drive connected to the MacStudio TB4 port doesn't seem to phase Apple, it's a fault with all external drive manufacturers according to Apple. That statement doesn't bode well for us with this problem. Perhaps Apple are correct and all external drive manufacturers need to look at their drivers!!!

Have you tried changing the disksleep settings in Terminal?

I was having this issue with my new mac studio and external hdd, of it sleeping after just a few seconds of inactivity, but I adjusted the disksleep manually and it seems to be fixed.

pmset -g shows you the current power management settings. the disksleep timer is in minutes and you can set it with

sudo pmset -a disksleep X (where X is number of minutes)(-a indicates 'all power modes', but you can set it different for battery 'b', charger 'c' etc., there is a manual with the details you can access in terminal with command man pmset

I set mine to 15 and so far so good.

I have seen this happen for several years depending on the drive. Some have software that will make the drive sleep if no activity. I always used Keep Drive Spinning V3.0 which works fine. I have now switched to all SSD's and now not an issue. Here is the link for the app: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/31158/keep-drive-spinning

Hi Everyone,

I want to reiterate that I have a workaround that does work --- Go to System Preference/Battery/Power Adapter -- check "Put hard disk to sleep...." and then uncheck it. Do the same for System Preference/Battery/Battery. Then Restart. This consistently works for me as annoying as it is.

So I ran tests with 3 external wd element desktop drives on both my intel macbook air 2015 with monterey & macbook pro 2021 M1 Max with monterey, and the behavior of powering up and down continously seems to be only happening with the M1 Max laptop.....Anyone do similar testing with older intel and new m1 computers? Right now im thinking this is a combination of a Monterey/m1 issue.

I have the same problem. Mac Studio, two OWC external drives. The drives spin down every minute or so. I'm using them for video editing. Simply pressing play produces a 5 second delay while the drive wakes up -- totally untenable.

I tried many of the ideas in this thread, and found that if you go to System Preferences > Energy Saver, turn on "Put Hard Disks to Sleep When Possible", and then turn it off again, your disk will not sleep until the computer itself sleeps. (One person in this thread indicated that you have to restart after doing this, but I didn't find that the restart made any difference.)

So a) toggle the setting above and b) set a much longer delay until the computer sleeps. If the system sleeps and wakes you'll find the drive spinning down, and then you have to do it again.

This is a tolerable workaround, but of course the whole thing is crazy, especially with a brand new (and rather expensive) computer.

Steve

Add me to the me too list. I've just taken delivery of a MacStudio running Monterey 12.5. I 've connect 3 LaCie RAIDS, two daisy chained through an Apple Raid2/3 adapter and a later model directly to a second Thunderbolt port. Same issue with all drives sleeping after 60 seconds, really frustrating but Amphetamine seems to keep things alive using the "Keep Drive Alive" option.

As I've had this PC for less than a week I'll call Apple support to report a hardware fault on the thunderbolt ports and see what they have to say. I'll request a replacement Mac if they don't have an immediate fix and take it from there :)

"Just to add more data points, when I wake my MacStudio up in the morning, it tells me my time machine drive was dismounted incorrectly,"

This sounds like the problem I've been tracking since 04/14/2022: two OWC miniStack STX boxes (Thunderbolt 4) with hard drives used for Time Machine only. They were daisy chained in a Thunderbolt chain. I was getting spontaneous disconnects (with dismounted incorrectly notifications) from several times a week to more than one a day, seemingly at random. This started on an M1 iMac with Thunderbolt 3, macOS 12.3, and continued on a Mac Studio with Thunderbolt 4 macOS 12.3 - 12.5. I never lost any data or saw any other problems with the drives.

Finally, I set up the two OWC miniStack STX boxes (Thunderbolt 4) connected directly to my Mac Studio (all Thunderbolt 4) with two Apple 3m Thunderbolt 4 cables. That has solved the problem for a full month so far. I almost never shut down or restart my Mac Studio. I'm now on macOS 12.6, which made no change in this behavior.

It seems like there's something about daisy chaining Thunderbolt. Maybe Ventura will fix this issue.

Amphetamine fixed the problem for me, it has preferences that ping my raid, I set it to every 30 seconds and it worked fine today.

Download Amphetamine, it takes care of the problem and is simple to set up

Try the app ‘amphetamine’. It has a setting called drive alive that keeps reading small files to your drive so it doesnt sleep.