Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

Not always. My disk will spin up/down while ejected (not mounted) EVER! As long as it's connected, it keeps spinning up and down.

Which leads me to believe it's a fairly low level problem in the driver stack.

Continuing to monitor my Disk Not Ejected properly issue (which may or may not be related to disks spinning up and down frequently):

I have two OWC miniStackSTX boxes (Thunderbolt 4) with 14T hard drives used only for Time Machine. One is connected to a Mac Studio with an Apple 3 m Thunderbolt 4 cable. The other is daisy chained to the first drive. Nothing else is on this Thunderbolt chain.

After three months of testing ports, switching the positions in the Thunderbolt chain and monitoring and record keeping, I can say for certain that that the drive in the OWC miniStackSTX box daisy chained (#2 in the Thunderbolt chain) spontaneously ejects much more often than the directly connected drive.

Add me to the me too list. I've just taken delivery of a MacStudio running Monterey 12.5. I 've connect 3 LaCie RAIDS, two daisy chained through an Apple Raid2/3 adapter and a later model directly to a second Thunderbolt port. Same issue with all drives sleeping after 60 seconds, really frustrating but Amphetamine seems to keep things alive using the "Keep Drive Alive" option.

As I've had this PC for less than a week I'll call Apple support to report a hardware fault on the thunderbolt ports and see what they have to say. I'll request a replacement Mac if they don't have an immediate fix and take it from there :)

"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.

@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.

Same problem here, seems to happen less with my Lacie RAID thunderbolt drive, but happens all the time with my USB 3.1 drive plugged directly into the rear ports on a M1 Max Studio. Every time I open up finder it beach balls for 10 seconds before showing the folders. Tried other cables, unchecked all the "put drives to sleep" check boxes, downloaded amphetamine...

Seems to work better after a restart for some unknown reason but starts spinning up and down constantly after a few minutes

If you are using amphetamine make sure you go into "Preferences" (not quick preferences), select the "Drive Alive" tab and add your external drives to the list (also click the check box so it is blue with a tick). That's working for me at the moment, still trying to get Apple to sensibly respond. I spoke with their tech support in the US and he was of the view it was a problem with the external drives and not the thunderbolt port driver included with the Monterey OS on Apple silicon. The fact that it is happening to any drive drive connected to the MacStudio TB4 port doesn't seem to phase Apple, it's a fault with all external drive manufacturers according to Apple. That statement doesn't bode well for us with this problem. Perhaps Apple are correct and all external drive manufacturers need to look at their drivers!!!

Have you tried changing the disksleep settings in Terminal?

I was having this issue with my new mac studio and external hdd, of it sleeping after just a few seconds of inactivity, but I adjusted the disksleep manually and it seems to be fixed.

pmset -g shows you the current power management settings. the disksleep timer is in minutes and you can set it with

sudo pmset -a disksleep X (where X is number of minutes)(-a indicates 'all power modes', but you can set it different for battery 'b', charger 'c' etc., there is a manual with the details you can access in terminal with command man pmset

I set mine to 15 and so far so good.

"Have you tried changing the disksleep settings in Terminal?"

I experimented with several settings shorter than the default 10 minutes.

Note that the issue I'm dealing with is external hard drives spontaneously unmounting*, not a spin-up, spin-down problem.

*sometimes the drives remount on their own, sometimes I have to restart or unmount all and unplug and replug the Thunderbolt cable.

"Right. It seems that this thread is simultaneously discussing two different issues: one is mount/unmount problem and the other is a disk sleep problem, which was my problem."

Is there a way to ask a moderator to separate the threads?

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.

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.

HASSLE is right.

I've got an OWC Raid also, with MacStudio running MacOS 12.4.

Editing in Premiere and leaving the app every now & then for other tasks... only to hear RAID spinning up again when returning to Premiere is really getting old.

[And it's now 8 months since your post– and still no solutions from Apple.]

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 could be wrong (and do tell me if I am) but I think using the pmset command to set the disksleep time is only applicable to the internal disk/s and would not apply to disks connected to a Thunderbolt port. Do say if this is not the case so not to leave any incorrect info here.