Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

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!

Mac Mini M1 - same problem !

• The external hard-drives go to sleep (LaCie d2 Pro) as expected.
• When I use an app (PDF Expert, Nikon Capture NX-D, ...) Monterey tries to wake up the external disk, even though everything I do is on my internal 2TB Macintosh SSD. I am not saving to the external disk and still the Mac wakes it up, which results in a beachball from 2 to 10 seconds.

Totally not acceptable.

• The workaround with Amphetamine is also not satisfying, as it spins my external disks all the time, even when I do not use them for hours.

Apple must fix this:

• The "sleep" system setting for external disks needs to have a time setting
• The external hard drives must stay in sleep, when they are not needed. The OS has to be intelligent enough to know. Just using an app or opening the "Save" dialog in an app should not try to wake up the external hard-drive as long as everything is happening on the internal SSD.
• There needs to be a more simple way to activate and deactivate external harddrives than the horrible "Disk Utility" App.
• And by the way: The "Disk Utility" app needs a design overhaul from zero. It is the most user unfriendly app in OSX.

Boys i updated today Monterey version 12.2 and it seems to have solved the problem.

I think...since today in addition to the update I also received and started using an OWCc Express 4M2 thunderbolt 3.

Now the GRAID thunderbolt 2 (with thunderbolt 3 adapter) is connected to the OWC port and not directly to the mbp m1 max thunderbolt 4 port, and magical it doesn't pause.

I don't know if it's because of the operating system update or because it's connected to the OWC which is running and not going to sleep prevents the other from going to sleep.

Let me know how you are doing

I have this issue too with an external hard drive that is connected directly to my Mac mini, M1, running Monterey. Previously, this external drive performed just fine. I have my power settings set to prevent disks from going to sleep. I checked with the hardware/software manufacturer of the device (OWC) and they are seeing the same issues in their testing. My hard drive enclosure is using HDDs, not SSDs, so the spin up and spin down is very noticeable. I was running a spreadsheet off this external drive today and the drive kept spinning down, causing the waiting "beachball" every time I wanted to make even a small change in the spreadsheet. This issue is causing significant performance issues with multiple operations during the day. I think there's a bug with Monterey.

same here, with mbp 16 m1 max.

The thing is that I use the external drive for work, video editing...and as I switch from one app to another or a few seconds of inactivity pass the drive goes into sleep automatically I also tried the amphetamine app but it doesn't solve the problem.

I'm wasting a lot of time and it's nerve-wracking, apple fix this ASAP!

saofrenzy,

Thanks for the update. Did the issue continue when connected directly? If so, the next step will be to create a new test user account on the Mac to see if the issue remains there.

Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Take care.

I have a different but probably related problem:

On my new 16" M1 Macbook Pro I have attached an Akitio Thunderbolt 2 RAID enclosure with 4 drives formatted as just a JBOD. If for example I unmount 2 drives and put my mac to sleep. When I wake it back up the 2 drives that I previously unmounted suddenly remount. This happens every single time.

(In case it matters: the RAID enclosure is connected to the 16" M1 Macbook Pro by way of an Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter)

Of note: this did not happen on my old 2013 trash can Mac Pro.

Apple: please get your act together.

I am also seeing occasional not ejected properly notifications. I've been tracking this issue since mid April.

I have two OWC Ministack STX units used as Time Machine drives. Each has a 14TB hard drive. One also has a 4TB SSD. The Ministack STX units were new in mid December 2021.

Sometimes the disks remount spontaneously, sometimes I need to restart to remount them.

Sometimes only one disk unmounts, sometimes both do, and rarely the SSD also unmounts.

Sometimes one or more will unmount twice in quick succession.

Once a disk unmounted as I was using the Mac. This happened while the other disk was active with Time Machine.

Once 9 days passed with no not ejected properly notifications, but otherwise it happens every few days.

I have tested pretty much everything:

Put hard disks to sleep when possible — checked, unchecked and using Terminal: sudo pmset -a disksleep [various settings]

Three different Thunderbolt 4 cables — Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable (3 m), Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable (1.8 m) and OWC's Thunderbolt 4 cables supplied with the Ministack STX units to Mac. OWC's Thunderbolt 4 cable between the units

Two Macs — 24" M1 iMac (off the shelf), Mac Studio (near maxed out) starting in mid May

Switched order of Ministack STX units in the Thunderbolt chain

Using Time Machine Back Up Automatically or using Backup Scheduler

Set Reduced Security on the M1 iMac as suggested by OWC (I left the Mac Studio at default Full Security)

Change security settings on the startup disk of a Mac with Apple silicon - Apple Support

Disk Utility in Recovery Mode on one of the 14T drives overnight. No problems found.

The M1 iMac has two OWC Pro Mini bus-powered drives for Time Machine and they never unmount spontaneously.

I have searched, but have found no app that can log drive mounts and unmounts.

I have posted the issue (briefly) to Apple Feedback.

I contacted Apple support to discuss and as one might expect, they wanted to point the finger at a 3rd-party app as the probable cause. They suggested I boot into safe mode as one option and see if the problem occurs. The other option was to create a new profile on the computer and use that instead of my current one.

I started with the safe mode and have actually been running that way for about a week. I noticed it still kind of freezes up with a delay when opening finder. I noticed it does happen on RAID and non-raid single HDD connected via Thunderbolt 3 or 4. It happens less frequently for sure using safe mode, but not 100%. I will probably try the new profile next week and see how that works to narrow things down.

As far as 3rd party apps go that I use frequently, I'll share a few of mine and maybe others can share as well and see if there's any commonalities.

• A big one is Adobe Lightroom Classic. This app doesn't map to all of my external drives and has no reason to call to the drives it doesn't use.
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe creative cloud
• Dropbox (mine is on an SSD)
• Google Drive (also on the SSD)
• BetterSnapTool
• Sophos Home
• Final Cut Pro
• Word, Excel
• Facebook Messenger
• Countour Mouse
• One Password
• Carbon Copy Cloner

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.

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

the follow-up - yeah, mileage varied. only on battery option doesn't stick.

what works currently, kinda: setting disk sleep time via terminal to 20 minutes - you're probably aware that you have to login as root user for setting to take effect, but there's no harm in pointing it out - and checking always put the hard disk to sleep if possible.

why kinda?

'cause it works only if mac doesn't go to sleep. if it sleeps, the problem comes back, disks spin down after approximately fourty seconds.

all of them, including new lacie 2big TB3 dock version 2 with default nas graded ironwolfs pro. one TB2 lacie is equipped with factory seagates that came when i bought it, and the other one is loaded with consumer range wd's. so it seems your theory that the problem might be connected to disk grade and its drivers doesn't hold up :) but it was a plausible theory.

i tried with seagate dashboard too. installed it. fired it up. the app didn't recognize any of the disks. uninstalled it.

installed the amphetamine too, but will wait to see if this currently helping workaround - unless mac sleeps - lasts. if not, then i'll try with amphetamine, despite that annoying icon/folder bouncing.

one off-topic question - how does disk utility recognize your lacie TB3 dock? mine says it's USB external disk, and i'm not sure it's ok since old lacie is recognized completely different, as visible in attached pics.

I have noticed that since installing 13.0 - now on 13.0.01 the hard drives will shut down after a period of non usage even with Put Hard Drives to Sleep - set to Never.

Was there ever discussed a solution?

Greetings saofrenzy,

We understand that you are having some difficulty using a third-party dock with your Mac, and we'd like to help. When you connect the external hard drive directly to your Mac, without using that dock, does this sleep issue remain?

Cheers.