Mac Mini - speed up USB3 ext drive access

Hello everyone,

I am now a few weeks into my adventure transition over to the Apple side of things. Most of it went well and with very minor struggles getting used to some quirks, err, features I consider myslef a happy customer. So much that I'm ready to replace the next general purpose Win PC in the house now with an iMac.

So I'm really right now with 2 and a half issues. This here is one:

I intentionally went with Mini as sort of a poor-man's-Mac-Pro to see if it could work with my needs split between semi-professional photo editing (Lightroom and Photoshop) music recording/composing (just switched to Logic for that) and some gneral purpose/work stuff (web, MS Office, simple web design, music and media collection, etc).

And it does indeed work. Compared to my previous Win desktop that I replaced all apps are really fast, especially with the SSD that I bought the Mac Mini with. The idea is to eventually go the Mac Pro route if need be. I've invested into a nice screen that works for my photo needs and a bunch of USB3 drives.

Now, the issue with the drives is that the SSD (256GB) can really just hold the OS and app data. Everything else (photos, audio files, documents, etc) really needs to live on one of the external drives at the moment (2TB, plus another drive for Time Machine and then some servers and stuff).

So again, the SSD is blistering fast. Opening Logic with all files on the SSD is a joy. Less so when it comes to things like Office or iTunes where data lives on the external USB3 drive. Once connected and spinning everything is fine. But the drive (G-drive 2TB) tends to spin down every now and so often and then it takes a good 15 seconds or so to be up and running again.

I know, that's clearly a first world problem. But I figured that the same thing would be the case with a $3000 Mac Pro with that same tiny SSD drive as main drive. So all that super duper speed and is hobbled because of realistic need to store and access large amounts of data.

But I figure there must be a way to solve that. The OS is set to not power down drives ever. Yet, the G-Drive still goes into some mode after a while and then I have to wait for Word or Excel to start up just like in Ye Olden Days.

Any thoughts or suggestions? (The Time Machine drive is a Lacie Porsche 3TB drive; in case it may make sense to swap it out for the G-Drive 2TB data drive)