Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

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.

I just ran a test using my M1 Max MBP with the same G-Drive, and it did the same weird behavior with spinning up and down as the Mac Studio without anything writing to that disk at all.

I'm now trying the same drive with my work issued 2019 Intel MBP (Monterey) to see if it's an Apple Silicon/Intel difference.

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 can confirm that with the same G-Drive (which is just WD UltraStar drive in a nice enclosure), the drive doesn't have the weird spin up/down issues on the Intel Mac.

So this does seem like something with Apple Silicon macs only.

I have this same issue with all of my external hard drives and it only started when I switched from an Intel Mac to my 14" MacBook Pro with M1 Max. Currently running the latest macOS 12.4 and like others have said if I reboot it seems to be be fine for about 24 hours and then my mac is constantly spinning down and spinning up the drive every 2 minutes. I either have to unplug the drive or reboot my Mac.

I see a lot of people mentioning the "Amphetamine" app. I tried it but it does not work, nor do I want to rely on a 3rd party app constantly writing to my disk every few seconds to try and workaround a macOS problem.

Has anyone submitted a case with Apple Care about this? Is Apple's engineering working on a fix?

My new MacStudio does the same: the external Thunderbolt RAID storage powers down, even though the setting in Power is to NOT put hard disks to sleep when possible.

Turn off display is set at 1hour, and at point it shut down the external RAID storage (8 disks actually).

I believe the problem is at a lower driver level and not necessarily related to power management settings.

If I eject my drive (so it's not even mounted in macOS), but leave it powered on and connected, it will still spin up and down and up and down.

Same problem here.

Mac Studio / Monterey 12.4

OWC hard drive connected via USB 3 connected through a hub.

Tried a direct connection -- no change.

This is ridiculous. I'm using the drive for video editing. After a 1 minute pause, the drive spins down and then if I hit play, I wait several seconds before I can actually play. This is nuts. It needs to be fixed.

Steve Cohen4,

Are you talking about a drive spinning down when it shouldn't?

The problem several of us are reporting is numerous Notifications that a drive was "not ejected properly." We should only get that notification when a drive is unplugged without being ejected in the Finder.

Have you changed the time until external drives sleep in Terminal? If you have Put hard disks to sleep when possible, the default time is 10 minutes.

Here's a little more information on my case.

I moved the Apple Thunderbolt Pro cable (3m) to a different Thunderbolt port on my Mac Studio. That had no effect.

Today I saw two Disk Not Ejected Properly notifications. They popped up simultaneously as I was watching. Both referred to the same drive. I immediately checked the drives in the Finder and both were mounted.

Both of my external drives were sleeping at the time of the notifications: no drive sound, not even a cooling fan in the OWC MiniStack STX boxes.

So I think it's possible that some of the Disk Not Ejected Properly notifications might be spurious.

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

I have a problem that seems to be related, but different. I have a MBP M1 Max running Monterey 12.4. Attached is the OWC Thunderbolt Dock, to which 1 8TB Thunderblade (SSD) and 1 48 TB Thunderbay (HDD) are attached. I do not have the spin up/spin down issue that is frustrating so many colleagues. Instead I can't get the OWC drives to eject or unmount. I am running Softraid 6.2.1and the OWC dock ejector app. That last app never works, and in fact once it starts running it does not unmount the dock or its attached drives, and just keeps trying, but freezes the computer and the only way to end it is a hard shutdown (holding the power key for 5 second). But I've tried within Softraid to unmount the OWC drives and that won't work. I try right clicking on the drive icons and clicking eject or unmount and that doesn't work either. If I leave my laptop running overnight (I use Keyboards Maestro to run macros overnight and Chronosync to backup my Thunderblade to my Thunderbay during early morning hours), and those will not run because the drives have been put to sleep and despite using the usual tricks in OSX to wake the MBP that worked in prior OSXes they won't run, I suspect because the drives are asleep despite having done what everyone else has done which is uncheck "put hard disks to sleep whenever possible." If anyone has found a way around this issue, I'd be happy to hear about it. Thanks.

Same issue here. Mac Studio with Apple RAID1, direct connection. Disks go to sleep a few seconds after read/write to disk, and neither pmset nor Energy / System Preferences settings make a difference.

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.

I have a question for those reporting "spin up/down" problems:

Do you see notifications of Disk Not Ejected properly along with the spin up/down issue?

In my experience over many years, external disks spin up sometimes because some process is requesting access. But I don't ever remember disks doing that as often as every 30 seconds.