LaCie d2 Pro HDD sleeps on iMac M4 despite settings

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Level 1

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LaCie d2 Pro HDD sleeps on iMac M4 despite settings

I have a brand new iMac M4 with 32GB RAM. I have a brand new LaCie 8TB d2 Professional Desktop Hard Drive with external power and USB-C connection. I have partitioned the drive into two 4Tb partitions. Both the computer and HDD were purchased from the Apple online store in Australia. The drive constantly goes to sleep when not being accessed and whenever I try to use it I have to wait for it to spin up. This is a real pain when photo editing and attending to emails or whatever and then back to the photos and wait for the drive. In the Energy settings in System Preferences I have Put hard disks to sleep when possible disabled. I sure wish I could have bought 8Tb internal SSD storage but I would have had to sell my car to pay for it... I cannot contact Seagate (who also own the LaCie brand) and using two browsers, Safari and Brave, I cannot get their support page to load properly. Perhaps they are still in holiday mode and their call centres are closed. Any suggestions? I have not noticed this issue before, but my old iMac had an internal 3Tb Fusion Drive and the external drives were only on for backups then, not as working daily use data drives.

This drive:

LaCie 8TB d2 Professional Desktop Hard Drive - Black - Apple (AU)

iMac (M4, 2024)

Posted on Jan 7, 2026 2:46 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

den.thed

Level 10

92,956 points

Jan 7, 2026 4:44 PM in response to MalenySteve

Hmm.. try the following Seagate link (it worked for me using Safari and choosing either US or Australia)

go to > https://www.seagate.com/support/lacie-downloads/

Scroll part way down that Seagate page to Firmware Downloads and enter the LaCie's serial #

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Answer 2

John Galt

Level 10

156,758 points

Jan 7, 2026 5:07 PM in response to MalenySteve

Many hard disk drives incorporate firmware to control its spin-down time. It lies beyond macOS's ability to control. Check with LaCie / Seagate to determine if they have a utility to modify its firmware. I doubt they do, but check anyway.

I no longer use LaCie enclosures, preferring to use bare drives in generic enclosures. They don't suffer from that problem. I also have drives in various Western Digital and Seagate enclosures. They spin down like yours, and I do not know of a way to prevent that. The delayed spin-up time is not important for the application in which they are used. In your use case, I understand how it would be annoying at best.

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Answer 3

MalenySteve Author

Level 1

18 points

Jan 7, 2026 4:53 PM in response to den.thed

Thanks for the advice. There are no firmware upgrades. I have tried using a Terminal command and will see how that goes. sudo pmset -a disksleep 0. Now, I am not sure if this will be harmful to the drive over the long term, and also whether it will prevent the drive sleeping when the actual iMac computer is made to sleep, or if I must shut the drive down each time. Very disappointing that this sort of issue is happening with brand new gear in 2026. Especially a drive sold by Apple specifically to work with this sort of iMac with limited internal storage.

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Answer 4

Feb 18, 2026 4:09 PM in response to MalenySteve

I have a Lacie d2 8TB and never had this issue until upgrading to an M4 Mini. But now I do. The entire system locks until the external drive spins up. Agree with OP that this is very disappointing. They do so much work to get their kit fast and then a bug like this undoes everything.

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