Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

Just an update on my system, still waiting for the 4 replacement disks for my older external units, the newer LaCie unit is still holding up, with no spinning down since replacing the disks with NAS grade ones. The older units still spinning down after 60 seconds.

Consider filling out a short bug report here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

Maybe it will get some traction and activity from Apple.

Could be a waste. It would be nice if people experiencing the issue continue to put in bug reports to Apple by going here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

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!

Thanks for confirming. I've been using Amphetamine as well. I wouldn't say it's a "fix" necessarily, but more of a band-aid for whatever bug is causing the problem. It doesn't work for my JBOD disks and I find my RAID ones keep spinning up and down, but less so when Amphetamine is running.

Just want to throw in my "what the heck Apple" complaint on this thread. Brand new fully spec'd Macbook Pro M1 Max w/ Monterey. 2 G-Raids plugged in via thunderbolt to USB C to thunderbolt dongle and they spool down after 1 min of inactivity and take about 30 seconds of pin-wheel in any program before I can do anything, including finder. So frustrating. Glad to hear amphetamine helps.. going to hop on that.

I'm using adobe lightroom as well. I have my catalog on one master drive (a WD elements), and two backups......All three of the drives do the same sleep/wake behavior without dismounting.....This has got to be an operating system issue......Western digital claims that they haven't heard of this problem, but the descriptions on here sound very similar to the issues that I am having which makes me think it is monterey not knowing how to play with certain drives...

For reference I have a macbook m1max with 24coregpu 64gb ram 1tb drive

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.

@Ryan0751, correct, it won't but will try asking Apple for that option as they don't seem to be in any hurry to look at the real issue which is probably related to the Thunderbolt driver for the Apple silicon PCs. I can insist that the external drives didn't have this problem on my iMac. I'm hoping that pushing for hardware replacement might escalate this so they fix the real problem. They can equally insist that it is not hardware related (which is correct), so if it's not then what is it, Apple need to start taking this as a real issue.

An interesting and likely theory which may lack some additional considerations. Mac mini 2018. I just have upgraded from Big Sur to Monterey 12.6. Right after the first boot I could watch the Hard Disk drives to be disconnected and connected again for lets say 5 times. Then this behavior came to an end. Yes, the hard drives go into sleep but as I am using it mainly for backups and archiving this ist not a problem to me - just saying.

I also could observe while moving one file into another folder (both on the same ssd) that I saw the beachball spinning and it took 5 seconds for the small file to get moved. This does not happen all the time by now, but it was remarkably slow.

Of course the new MacOS is the main factor in the behavior as the disk drives did not have similar problems before Monterey.

And also it is a shame that such a degradation of the system is still not fixed completely 5 upgrades later.

So here my theory which does not interfere with yours: Apple made changes in the way the system is dealing with drives for whatever reason. Likely to get some performance improvements. To ovoid the Hard Disk problem from happening for the most users, I assume they installed a patch which monitors the hard drive behavior during the first boot and when there are problems detected there automatically will be a fix applied to the disk management.

This also would mean that they stick to their changes they have done. Ventura is coming and the long term plan does likely exclude any fall back solutions.

That means for me that I have lost any confidence in Monterey. I will downgrade to Big Sur before I risk my hard drives getting damaged and hopefully there will be no degradation in my system behavior when continuing using Big sur. It would not be the first time I could experience that when a new release is due to be installed, the bugs in my current system become more visible the longer I avoid an upgrade.

I do not know where Apple is heading to. They have created a fantastic operation system where there is no serious alternative for a power user who also enjoys the ergonomics of a fantastic UI. It's quite sad to see this happening with no reasonable hope to turn for the better.

ONE MONTH LATER: As far as I'm concerned the problem has resolved entirely. My external disks run and sleep appropriately and have had no recurrence of the "sleep after 30 seconds" problem. I have them set to disksleep after 15 minutes of inactivity, and I do a complete shutdown (rather than sleep) at the end of the day. Not sure why others are still having troubles, but perhaps there are hubs involved or other things? Good luck mates.

Still having this exact same problem. Super annoying. Using OWC raids for video editing. Plugging into doc or straight into mac doesn't matter.

In Monterey, I could reboot with the drives plugged in and that would fix it.

That hack isn't working in Ventura anymore. After I reboot, my system goes straight to "sleep" mode and I have to wake it up, which seems to prevent the reboot hack from working.