Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

Same issue here with both a 13" M1 MacBook Pro and a 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro. The workaround I've found is to go into system preferences and check and uncheck at the disk sleep options for both battery and power adapter and then restart. It's super annoying but it works. Apple please fix this! It's been going on for over a year.

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

Its a quirky issue and people have been reporting different levels of success with amphetamine….ive done the same test ur about to do with three wd platter drives on my old intel macbook; all three of the drives worked with no issues on the intel macbook and all three drives have the spin up/down behavior on my m1 macbook. Both laptops have the latest version of monterey.

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.

Right, you can only see the disksleep timer in Terminal and can only change it there. Why? beats me.

But its fairly easy to see the current setting and change it. I think "0" is never sleep, but that seems to not be reliable. I've set mine to "15", plugged my hdd 4-bay directly to the Studio instead of a hub, and that seems to be working. If I'm not hitting the disk once in 15 minutes, I'm probably not doing anything disk intensive, but seems like it would also work if set to 60 or whatever.

same spindown/up problem. mbp m1 pro 16, two daisy chained lacie 2big docks thunderbolt 2 raid, one apple software raided set, and 4 non raid disks via caldigit ts4, os ventura.

currently functional workaround: setting the put the hard disks to sleep to only on battery.

this works so far. your, and mine, mileage may vary.

on monday i'll have a new lacie 2 big dock thunderbolt 3 delivered and hooked up. hopefully it'll work.

Many have this issue Do not use sleep feature. use screen saver only.

Happy to say that the latest update fixed this for me. I have a m1 max 16” with an OWC flex 8. Now my hard drives remain spinning all day and instant reads after leaving the computer for a few hours.

Hi

Have the same issues here as others, just upgraded from 2019MBP to new maxed out M1 and external thunderbolt drive off to sleep after 30 seconds. Using to run Resolve and every time i hit play which i now have to wait about 20 secs before it wakes up and plays. The only fix i have found is to plug in the drive, wait for it to show up then whilst still connected resart the MBP. For some reason this then keeps it active but as soon as i pull the lead and plug it back in the sleep issue returns. Not end of the world issue but boring as **** when just spent £3600 to upgrade and having issues.

Just plug in the drive, wait for it to show up, restart the machine and you're good to go all day long, no additional software needed. Works for me every time.

M1 Max connected via Thunderbolt to a G-Raid.

Throwing my complaint into the bucket as well. Been going back and fourth with OWC for the past two weeks to no avail. Glad I found this thread as I figured it was likely a Monterey issue. I can repeat the problem down to the 60th second in finder with my flex8 RAID 5 array, as I hear the disks power down files cannot be quickly previewed, after about 10 seconds everything reconnects. So Apples whole "third party" argument is void. Got Amphetamine running, will use as a band-aid until this get's patched.

I JUST got my Mac Studio, and went through the setup this weekend. My OWC raid does the same thing. I have run this raid on my 2013 Mac Pro for two years without this problem. Matter of fact, my 2013 Mac Pro has a Terramaster 5 bay array on it, and it does not do this. I think it is safe to say that the problem is with the Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, in Monterey, and definitely not third party software, or what the IT people commonly refer to as "a user problem". This thread is going on 5 months now, and Apple hasn't done anything about it (that we know of). We shouldn't have to run another third party software to address what Apple says is caused by a third party software.

"I don’t think replacing your hardware is going to do anything.

I see the same problem on both my Apple Silicon machines."

I have had the same experience with my problem of occasional spontaneous disk ejection of two external OWC miniStack STX boxes.

I logged this issue for a full month using an M1 24" iMac, then for two more months (so far) with a Mac Studio Ultra and Studio Display.

Drive type is opposite for me - all 8 in my three external enclosures are NAS drives - 6 Seagate Exos enterprise-level designed to be running 24/7; other 2 are older WD Red consumer-level that might have firmware sleep timers - but they all behave the same.

Did you do manual pmset before or after you swapped your Seagate drives into the LaCie enclosure? I'm wondering now if only drives that were connected when the system update occurred have been affected, and that if you attach something new, it'll behave normally until the system setting changing (manually or otherwise) overrides it.

I've had some luck changing pmset to 120 instead of 0 - drives are no longer spinning down constantly, but it almost feels like they do exactly every 2 hours as if it's forcing it instead of waiting for inactivity? I'm toying with changing it to 8 or 9 hours just to get through the work day.

I also have Wake for Network Access turned off in Energy Saver, but I notice the computer waking up/drives spinning up periodically anyway (it's all plugged into a UPS, can see the remaining battery time drop whenever it does this).