I wanted to share my experience with my M2, Mac mini and G Dr. external hard drive spec the fix that would stop it from spinning up and spinning down like every five minutes, so if you wanna figure that out if it bothers you, you have your computer set up in your bedroom like I do where I’m trying to go to sleep and all I hear is this external hard drive spinning up and down and this is the post for you.
Mac mini (M2, 2023)
Why not shut down your computer at night. This will accomplish two things: 1 - it'll eliminate the noise of the rotating drive ramping up and and down all night and: 2 - shutting down will clear out temporary system and application cache and swap files. This will help with system and application performance.
Here is what I found from another post. It went unanswered, but had some really good sleuthing things to perform in order to figure this out. My goal is to answer this question with a couple of fixes that may or may not work for you. All I can do is give you my experience.
So what is the solution?
External Hard Drive constantly spinning up and down
