Kernel Panic during sleep

Disconnect all third party peripherals before going to sleep. About the only "safe" peripherals are keyboard and mice. If an external hard drive is connected, quit the open programs that might be using it, and dismount the external drive first before going to sleep.

Many peripherals are not familiar with Mac OS low power mode, which remains in effect until you restart the Mac.

Your Energy Saver settings of put hard drive to sleep when possible can trigger it more often.

Bring it in for service. It may be something has happened with the logic board such as bad memory.

Backup your data before bringing it in for service. and make sure the Energy Saver is off when backing up your data.

Upgrades don't cause kernel panics, but because they may address different parts of memory, may expose a fragility not seen before.

The gray arrow points out another possibility, the power manager itself which is often controlled through the system management controller may need resetting.

https://purplecomputing.com/tech-how-to/how-to-reset-the-smc-system-management-controller/

Discusses how to do this with each Mac.

Back in early versions of MacOS there was an option in System Preferences, under Energy Saver to "Put hard disks to sleep when possible".

sudo pmset disksleep 0

That will turn it off. Setting a value in minutes will turn Hard disk sleep for that amount of time. Default was 10.

If it is a laptop, you can set it for battery (-b) or AC power (-c) or both (-a).

To only disable hard disk sleep on wall charger:

sudo pmset -c disksleep 0

But, that all seems irrelevant now that you found the other setting which works for you.

All of the power management settings can be set via the Terminal (or editing the associated property lists).

You can see what options are available using:

man pmset

The electric light co blog has a decent tutorial:

https://eclecticlight.co/2017/01/20/power-management-in-detail-using-pmset/

The problem is the power the drive is able to manage during sleep. You can supplement drive power with a hub that takes pass through power from a USB-C adapter that is sufficient,

https://www.smklink.com/products/usb-c-multi-port-hub

As for your music library, do you have it on multiple drives, or just one? You never want to have your data in just one place. You never know when that one place might fail.

Hi doubtful those error mistakes will make any difference.

Like finding a needle in a haystack. Process of elimination can verify if it is reproducible with the drive, versus without.

If it happens every time you go to sleep after opening the music, but does not happen if the drive is disconnect, you can be sure something about the drive was not too happen.

http://www.binaryfruit.com/ DriveDX lets you evaluate the health of both internal and external drives. That can at least show is the problem the cable or the drive itself.

Thanks.

Forgot I had a license of Amphetamine (I use it on the laptop). So I am using that to prevent the Mac mini from sleeping now, allowing the monitor to power off.

Hi, I have the same issue as the OP but in my case I’ve found that there are zero problems in Mojave. As soon as I upgrade to Monterey or Ventura, I get crashes during sleep. Surely it’s something software related? I haven’t tested Big Sur or Catalina yet. Thinking the transition to os11 is the culprit for me

I do not have any external devices connected except the Apple Magic Mouse and Keyboard.

I also faced this issue when upgrading from Big Sur to Monterey. Now it again happened after upgrading from Monterey to Ventura.