External hard drive constantly sleeping after 30 seconds even though settings say never sleep

I have posted this before, but it appears to have been removed.

I have a Macbook Pro (details below) with an external hard drive attached (not SSD). I edit videos on FCP and the hard drive is constantly sleeping after less than 1 minute of the computer not doing anything.

I have set the hard drives to never sleep in power settings but it has no effect. It appeared to have been fixed in an update last year but now it's back again. Really hitting productivity hard as it takes about 40 seconds for the hard drive to wake up and the computer essentially freezes until it has.

Battery settings are on high power, 'Put hard disks to sleep when possible ' is set to never.

Hope someone answers, this forum seems to have been completely destroyed in recent years. There used ot be a good community here but it has been 'anonynimised', removing everyone's identity.

I have listed the external hard drive but I don't believe it's related as it has the same behaviour with other external hard drives - powered/unpowered

Chip Apple M1 Max

Memory 64 GB

Startup disk Macintosh HD

macOS Sonoma 14.3.1

External Drive: WD Elements WDBWLG0200HBK-XB