Mac Studio and External Drive

This has been an increasing problem with some Bus Powered drives that do not react gracefully to the Mac dropping power during sleep.

Doing this helps Apple meet their Energy-Star requirements, so I do not expect this to change.

If it is a problem for you, you can use a different drive that tolerates power drops more gracefully, or provide an external power supply to the drive you have.

Removed the Seagate USB3 8TB ext drive and replaced with GDrive 8TB ext drive with Thunderbolt 3 interface and all of the problems with sleep and drive not shutting down went away.

It’s been running with no issues for over a week now.

Perhaps the application Jettison can solve your problem.

https://stclairsoft.com/Jettison/

I said no spinners but conveniently forgot the 12 TB backup. I'll remove it today and see how things go. Sorry for the brain gas.

I have two LaCie 2.5 inch 5TB external drives connected to my Mac Studio Ultra and this is what I've noticed …

When I put the Mac into sleep mode and then wake it, the external hard drives appear to remain shut off. When I access the drive/s, it/they will wake, but will then spin down and shut off almost immediately. It doesn't matter what settings I enable or disable in my Energy Preferences pane.

The Mac Studio seems to respect the settings in the Energy Preferences pane after a fresh shutdown and restart, but once it goes into sleep mode and wakes again, the external drives don't ever seem to properly wake from sleep and behave normally again. Even with the Energy Pref 'Put hard drives to sleep when possible' enabled, I would expect the drives to remain awake for around 10 minutes before shutting off due to inactivity, but the Mac Studio is shutting these drives off almost immediately. I had an application open with auto-save set to 2 minutes and the application was pausing every time it did an auto-save – so the Mac Studio wasn't even keeping this drive powered up for 2 minutes.

I've heard - and it may have been here - that the Mac Studio and possibly Monterey are buggy with USB2. I've heard that replacing my USB hubs with USB to Thunderbolt or USB 3 will eliminate the problem. Has anyone tried that?

I had the same issue with my Mac Mini M1 and the LG 5K display. I tried several different drives and cables but had no luck. Did not matter if connected to the display or the Mac directly. I finally disabled sleep and only use screen saver mode. This started with Monterey. Others have also had this issue.

Unfortunaly, after the first impression, I executed a more deeper trial and the Gdrive has the same behaviour of Lacie. The problem does not depend on the disk brand or the formatting way.

I am always more convinced that ther is a bug which involves Mac Studio Ultra with Monterey in the management of external mechanical HD.

Do not put drives to sleep.

OK, it has been over 3 months. Multiple updates to macOS have been released and I STILL have this (beyond) annoying issue. It actually reduces productivity as I frequently have to wait for my RAID drives to spin-up: while copying a file, while saving a Photoshop file, when randomly using other apps. I have tried all settings. I am primarily using SSD drives but still backup to a spinning, self-powered, RAID drive connected via USB C. I am now going to remove all spinning drives from my Studio Mac and use only SSDs. I just added a 2TB Thunderbolt SSD for TimeMachine. I doubt I'll have the waiting issue with just SSDs.

But, come-on Apple- fix this!

Backups across the Network:

If your old Mac is running at least 10.13, it supports Time machine shared destinations across the network. You take an extra step when Sharing a drive on the backup machine, and that designates that drive (or a portion of that drive) as a Time machine destination.

Use a shared folder with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

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I have 3 external USB drives directly connected to my Mac Studio that have their own power BUT still spin down, no matter power settings for "sleep when possible" or "prevent Mac from sleeping" :(

yes it does in your energy saver pane. See what IIIaass is showing. Check off the box to prevent sleep when display is off and do not check put hard drive to sleep..

Correct. Everything works OK BUT the Finder and apps are pausing/freezing until all the drives are spun up. Drive spin down "randomly" but frequently. Probably unrelated but I also see drive-to-drive copies starting and working quickly until about 2/3 through a large (GB) copy - then copies SLOW way down - but do finish.

My issue, is similar but different.

Our Mac studio replaced a iMacPro 2017 which used an external USB3 8 TB Seagate HD drive. It didn’t have any of these problems on iMac Pro.

I moved usb3 drive to Mac Studio, and now the ext drive during shutdown of Studio does the following;

• Mac Studio given command to shutdown
• when Studio front led goes out, the Seagate drive starts the spins down, but a second later the drive spins back up even though the Mac is shutdown.

I tried waiting for a few minutes thinking it might spin down again, but it doesn’t.

The only way to get USB3 ext drive to shutdown is to pull the usb cable from Mac right after it initially spins down when power is removed. It’s sorta like playing roulette on getting usb pulled before power spins it back up.

Also tried connecting a 10 Tb GDrive with thunderbolt and it shutdown drive when Studio led went out.

So I tried another Seagate drive with usb3, and it shutdown, then spun back up, but after a a few mins of time, it spun down.

My initial tech assessment is this is a MacStudio/usb3 issue, which hopefully will get a fix shortly.