Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

This fix seems to work on my Macbook Pro M1 MAX with OWS Thunderbay:

Terminal command:

caffeinate -i -m 

Thanks to the OWC support team

I've done today the last monterey update, nothing about the bug fix of the external disks that go in standby. now let's put our souls in peace, apple is not interested in solving this bug. We have to continue with third party apps like amphetamine and similar. Honestly i don't like having the hard disk icons dancing from icon image to folder all the time, it gives me the idea of instability (using amphetamine with the option to keep the disks awake every 10 seconds).

Such a shame

Chiming in with "I have the same issue": after waking M1 Max Studio running 12.4 from sleep, ext drives (WD MyBook Duo, OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual, OWC Thunderbay 4) will spin up/down every 30 seconds regardless of what's set in Energy Saver. Don't think the connection matters, it's blanket across everything no matter how they're plugged in.

Only "fix" I've found from some other forum is to trash the Power Management prefs and restart, then uncheck "put hard disks to sleep when possible" again in Energy Saver. This only works until the next time you put the computer to sleep, so I usually have to do this minimum of once per day. I always find two PM pref files in ~/Library/Preferences/ though, one labeled normally and one with some extra numbers/letters on the end.

Just submitted feedback bug report to Apple, would really appreciate a real system-level fix as this is not just an annoyance when trying to work, but will actually damage your spinning drives over time if left unchecked.

Have you tried going the opposite way? I mean clearly the no sleep option is buggy since it doesnt work in system preferences. But if you set your disk sleep timer to something ridiculously high, like 60 minutes, that should prevent sleep from happening anytime you are doing anything that involves your hdd but let them sleep overnight or when you are away from your desk. Try it and report back. It works for me so far.

I won't discount that this may be the case for some people and drives, but its definitely not my experience. If it were drive-specific firmware putting my disks to sleep rather than the mac, then that behavior would be consistent, and its not. My drives were working and sleeping normally until I got and hooked up my Studio Display, did some rearranging of my ports and software updates and then after that I started having the Sleep At 60 seconds problem. Same enclosure, same drives. This persisted for a few days, and then I did some Terminal adjustments to the settings and that changed the disc sleep for a day. But then it started again.

Provisionally, I have found that doing a shutdown at night and restart in the morning (rather than just overnight sleep) seems to "remind" the mac of the disks and the sleep settings, so my current guess is that deep sleep may be the culprit in losing track of the disk sleep settings. Not sure, but have not had the spin down issue since beginning my daily shutdown/boot up regime. I do NOT use the "0" setting, but rather I have set the disksleep to 15 minutes, which for me is seems enough when I am working on anything involving the drives and video playback to keep them awake.

Just an update...

I've installed the Ventura release candidate on my Mac Studio (M1 Ultra).

My G-Tech G-Drive seems to still somewhat frequently spin down/up, despite the setting for "Put hard disks to sleep if possible".

Which is disappointing.

However, what IS different is that the Amphetamine App seems to keep the drive from spinning down for me now (whereas before, it didn't). I set it up to write to the spinning drive once a minute, and it no longer spins down.

So, I have a Studio, not a laptop, so not sure if its the same issues. But my version of this problem ended when I connected my HDD array directly to the mac, not to my hub, and set via terminal my disksleep to 15 minutes. Now my drives spin up and down as needed predictably and have not had any problems for quite a while.

Hi,

I've got the exact same problem with my external raid on an M1 macbook pro.

What "solved" my problem was using automator to create an automation and let it move a 1kb file from one folder to another every 20 sec or so.

Maybe there was already a solution but at least you don't need to install any software for it that you normally wouldn't want on your mac.

Apple needs to fix this as it's really annoying!

Cheers!

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.

I am still on Monterey 12.0.1 with my M1 Mac Mini. To further test, I changed my OWC Thunderbay enclosure (4 disks) from Raid being managed by OWCs proprietary software SoftRAID (6.2) to having Apple manage the RAID. The drive still bounced between sleep and wake. I changed the drives to JBOD instead of RAID and fully uninstalled SoftRAID from my Mac to ensure the drivers were not interfering. Still, the drives bounce between sleep and wake. I have a 2nd enclosure from LaCie that is RAID managed by hardware and this drive continues to bounce between sleep and wake. I will update to Monterey 12.2 and see if there is any difference, but from my testing, there continues to be an issue with the way the Mac is managing external HDDs.

I'm using Amphetamine on my Mac Studio, and it's working just fine. Just have to put up with the swapping hard drive icon. Thing is, we shouldn't have to use Amphetamine to keep the drives from constantly spinning up and down in the first place.

SECOND UPDATE:

So I don't know if this is going to be consistent or what, but I've found that if I SHUTDOWN my mac at night and restart in the morning, it seems to correctly remember the sleep settings for the rest of the day. This is based on only a couple of days, but the previous week I had been just sleeping it overnight.

If anyone else tries this with success, advise.

I'm similar to your setup , two Lacie 2Bigs (TB 2 connected via Apple's TB3 to TB2 adapter) and a 2Big Dock (TB3). Still having the same problem of all 3 docks spinning down every minute but keeping them alive with Amphetamine.

I haven't tried using the seeing of only sleeping on battery, I'll give that a go.

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.

Try the app "keep drive spinning"