Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

I have a different but probably related problem:

On my new 16" M1 Macbook Pro I have attached an Akitio Thunderbolt 2 RAID enclosure with 4 drives formatted as just a JBOD. If for example I unmount 2 drives and put my mac to sleep. When I wake it back up the 2 drives that I previously unmounted suddenly remount. This happens every single time.

(In case it matters: the RAID enclosure is connected to the 16" M1 Macbook Pro by way of an Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter)

Of note: this did not happen on my old 2013 trash can Mac Pro.

Apple: please get your act together.

Same thing here.

MacBook Pro 16 M1Pro - connected two lacie drives through daisy chain - all settings at system preferences are selected correctly, today I made the latest update of Monterey.

This is serious. Apple.

Apple this is serious. There is almost no one in this world who's using these computers without using external drives. Expensive external drives with expensive data inside.

Apple this is serious.

It is not just a bug. It is a huge problem with huge risks.

I'm currently doing tests on my old macbook air 2015 intel with monterey (i know for certain im having issues with my macbook m1max with monterey), hooking my external drives to lightroom to observe behavior.....i have a feeling this might be a monterey and/or m1 specific issue, and might not be necessarily affecting intel macs with monterey. will report back in a bit.

Frustrating issue. My company prevents me from administrating my own computer, but I have the setting "unchecked" to "Put Hard Drives to sleep..", yet every minute, the hard drives go to sleep.

Almost unusable, and I can't expect my company to make me an admin to prevent this change.

And yes, my computer is also an M1 Max MacBook Pro.

I have the same setup: A new Mac Studio Ultra, and a G-Drive Pro (spinning rust).

The G-Drive is configured as an encrypted Time Machine volume, therefore macOS formatted it as APFS encrypted.

I'd expect the disk to spin down, then come up for hourly backups. However, I notice it spinning down and back up quite frequently. Sometimes it feels like every 5 or 10 minutes.

As others said, whenever this happens any operation that is iterating over the available disks freezes.

Disabling the System Preferences option to "Put drives to sleep if possible" doesn't seem to make any difference.

I tried to use Amphetamine but since the volume is not writeable by my user I can't select it.

I tried moving the G-Drive from using a USB-C cable direct to the Mac Studio, to using a USB Type-A port on a CalDigit TS3+ TB3 dock.

The issue seems to be persisting. Spin down/up/down/up.

This is going to kill my drive.

Probaby unrelated, but my 12TB G-Drive thunderbolt RAID fully died while plugged into my new macbook pro in latest OSX one day after turning on amphetamine. Lost 11TB of video footage and work from the last 2 years.

I just discovered that through the magic of APFS volumes, I can create a writeable volume that shares the drive with Time Machine (the Time Machine volume isn't writeable, even as root).

This should let me try out Amphetamine. We will see.

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.

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 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.

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.