Mac OSX Monterey External Hard Disks Going to Sleep

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.

Just wanted to post a SAME HERE!

Recently got a MBP 16 w/M1 Max. Using a OWC USB 4 drive enclosure, RAID 5 with latest version of softraid and it just powers up and down. Never unmounts though.

"Sometimes" on a clean reboot it doesn't do this but always after being undocked. Tried the adrenaline app and so far that seems to keep it spun up. Clearly there is a bug somewhere.

My external hard drives are only used for Time Machine, so spinning down is not an issue for me.

I did notice after the macOS 12.5.1 update that one of my drives spun up before my Mac Studio had completely rebooted. Clearly, the drive did that on its own, unrelated to the Mac Studio.

Update on my separate hard drive issue of drives spontaneously unmounting and producing one or more Notifications that the drive was not ejected properly—

Background: two OWC miniStack STX boxes Thunderbolt 4 daisy chained from a Mac Studio. Each box has a 14T hard drive. One box also has a 4T SSD. Everything's Thunderbolt 4. I've tested every configuration I could think of and several different Thunderbolt 4 cables.

I have logged as many Notifications as I could, and noticed that the second OWC miniStack STX on the Thunderbolt 4 daisy chain spontaneously ejected much more often that the one plugged directly into the Mac Studio. So I plugged both drives into my Mac Studio directly, so there's no daisy chaining. Ten days have passed with no spontaneous unmounting.

I ordered a second 3m Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable so I can have both drives located where I want them.

This is an expensive solution and shouldn't be necessary. I think it clearly implicates something about Thunderbolt 4. But I can live with this solution.

That's an interesting theory, except for many of us have used these drives with Intel Macs with VERY different behaviors.

We aren't talking about normal drive spin-down here. I expect and want my drive to spin-down!

What I don't want is for a drive that isn't in use to spin back up, then down, then back up, every few minutes. That is not normal!

With my drives connected to an Intel Mac, the behavior is as expected.

I won't discount that this may be the case for some people and drives, but its definitely not my experience. If it were drive-specific firmware putting my disks to sleep rather than the mac, then that behavior would be consistent, and its not. My drives were working and sleeping normally until I got and hooked up my Studio Display, did some rearranging of my ports and software updates and then after that I started having the Sleep At 60 seconds problem. Same enclosure, same drives. This persisted for a few days, and then I did some Terminal adjustments to the settings and that changed the disc sleep for a day. But then it started again.

Provisionally, I have found that doing a shutdown at night and restart in the morning (rather than just overnight sleep) seems to "remind" the mac of the disks and the sleep settings, so my current guess is that deep sleep may be the culprit in losing track of the disk sleep settings. Not sure, but have not had the spin down issue since beginning my daily shutdown/boot up regime. I do NOT use the "0" setting, but rather I have set the disksleep to 15 minutes, which for me is seems enough when I am working on anything involving the drives and video playback to keep them awake.

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).

HI Nellisoft, OK, that's useful to know. I did the pmset command before changing the drives out and haven't changed it from 0 since, so that could fit in with your theroy. I'm waiting for delivery of 4 Seagate Iron Wolf drives, I'll swap them out with the drives in the two older LaCie enclosures and post what I find. For now the newer 2Big Dock Thunderbolt 3 is still not spinning down, whereas the the two older units are. This inconsistency in external drive behavior, one remaining up and two spinning down after 60 seconds, still makes me think it might be the drive type. I have tried them on different thunderbolt ports to try and remove the ports as an issue.

macOS 12.5.1 still doesn't fix the problem for me an my G-Tech drive.

Even with "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" disabled, and pmset showing a value of 0 for "disksleep", my drive is still spinning down, and up, and down.

Same issue for me, 2x WD Red (WD40EFAX) in Akasa USB box, formatted with APFS & RAID. MBP 13" M1, Monterey 12.5.1 and still not resolved. It's painful since I have a Lightroom library in that RAID array and disks are going down/up many times when working with my photos. I am certain this issue started a month or two ago, maybe after some update. Apple, please, get this resolved.

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.

"Ten days have passed with no spontaneous unmounting.

I ordered a second 3m Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable so I can have both drives located where I want them."

Ten more days have passed with no spontaneous unmounting after installing the second 3m Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable.

Oddly, the disk spontaneously unmounted twice the morning after I moved it the first time and connected it directly to my Mac Studio. Exactly the same thing happened when I moved the disk a second time and installed the 3m Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable.

But after spontaneously unmounting twice in quick succession after each move, the system's been completely stable.

(Note that I'm not monitoring unusual spin up and spin down as my disks are used only for Time Machine.)

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.

Just to add more data points, when I wake my MacStudio up in the morning, it tells me my time machine drive was dismounted incorrectly, plus sleep disconnects my printer (ethernet through a caldigit hub) when it goes to sleep so I have to restart my machine whenever I want to print anything. I'm thinking I should just shut my machine down at night rather than letting it sleep, but that's a work around, not a fix.

"Just to add more data points, when I wake my MacStudio up in the morning, it tells me my time machine drive was dismounted incorrectly,"

This sounds like the problem I've been tracking since 04/14/2022: two OWC miniStack STX boxes (Thunderbolt 4) with hard drives used for Time Machine only. They were daisy chained in a Thunderbolt chain. I was getting spontaneous disconnects (with dismounted incorrectly notifications) from several times a week to more than one a day, seemingly at random. This started on an M1 iMac with Thunderbolt 3, macOS 12.3, and continued on a Mac Studio with Thunderbolt 4 macOS 12.3 - 12.5. I never lost any data or saw any other problems with the drives.

Finally, I set up the two OWC miniStack STX boxes (Thunderbolt 4) connected directly to my Mac Studio (all Thunderbolt 4) with two Apple 3m Thunderbolt 4 cables. That has solved the problem for a full month so far. I almost never shut down or restart my Mac Studio. I'm now on macOS 12.6, which made no change in this behavior.

It seems like there's something about daisy chaining Thunderbolt. Maybe Ventura will fix this issue.