I have 3 external hard drives attached to my Mac Studio via a USB 3 hub. These drives are repeatedly spinning down then spinning up. It's driving me crazy. Is there a way to prevent drive spinning down while the Mac Studio is in use?
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External Hard Drives Keep Spinning Down / Spinning Up
- Thread starter nigel415674
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Check in System Settings>Energy Saver and make sure "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" is off. If these HDD's are WD drives, you need to turn off sleep timer in the firmware with their own drive utility tool. You can get that here:
support-en.wd.com
Western Digital Support | Western Digital
Find detailed answers to your support questions for your Western Digital, SanDisk, WD_BLACK, or WD storage product.
Many USB hard drives have their own energy settings in FW. For example, many WD drives use a utility to set preferences.
To keep drives from spinning down, I've used Amphetamine:
Looking at the WD utilities, it looks like the default sleep time is "30 minutes". I know mine spin down a lot sooner than that, so I'm guessing it's macos that's sleeping them, not the drive's FW.
My fight has more often been to find out what keeps waking my drive back up, and I usually revert to lsof from the command line.
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Looking at the WD utilities, it looks like the default sleep time is "30 minutes". I know mine spin down a lot sooner than that, so I'm guessing it's macos that's sleeping them, not the drive's FW.
My fight has more often been to find out what keeps waking my drive back up, and I usually revert to lsof from the command line.
Thanks, will check it out.Check in System Settings>Energy Saver and make sure "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" is off. If these HDD's are WD drives, you need to turn off sleep timer in the firmware with their own drive utility tool. You can get that here:
Western Digital Support | Western Digital
Find detailed answers to your support questions for your Western Digital, SanDisk, WD_BLACK, or WD storage product.
The "spin down, spin up" syndrome is one which bothers many, many Mac users.
I don't think you're going to find a "definitive solution" that works all the time.
At least, for preventing them from spinning down now and then.
Some of this may be "a feature" of some drive controller boards on some drives (i.e., not specifically linked to the Mac or the Mac OS).
I'll offer a potential work-around.
Use "Semulov" to dismount drives that aren't actively "in use".
Get it here. It's free:
What Semulov does:
It puts a simple menu into your menu bar (on the right).
From that menu, you can dismount/remount external drives.
Just "look at it" and you'll see what to do.
WHY I suggest this.
Again, there may not be a way to keep drives from RANDOMLY spinning down.
But you can PRO-ACTIVELY dismount and remount them at YOUR convenience using Semulov.
So... using Semulov... only mount drives when YOU need to access them.
Otherwise, dismount them and hopefully they'll STAY dismounted until you again need to use them.
I don't think you're going to find a "definitive solution" that works all the time.
At least, for preventing them from spinning down now and then.
Some of this may be "a feature" of some drive controller boards on some drives (i.e., not specifically linked to the Mac or the Mac OS).
I'll offer a potential work-around.
Use "Semulov" to dismount drives that aren't actively "in use".
Get it here. It's free:
It puts a simple menu into your menu bar (on the right).
From that menu, you can dismount/remount external drives.
Just "look at it" and you'll see what to do.
WHY I suggest this.
Again, there may not be a way to keep drives from RANDOMLY spinning down.
But you can PRO-ACTIVELY dismount and remount them at YOUR convenience using Semulov.
So... using Semulov... only mount drives when YOU need to access them.
Otherwise, dismount them and hopefully they'll STAY dismounted until you again need to use them.
What external hard drive make/model and what hub?
The issue is that hubs vary greatly. Most of them, unfortunately do not allow the use of every port at full speed. So connecting a myriad of devices can lead to power draw issues. Without knowing what make/model you have, impossible to tell for sure.
Most third party enclosures/drives that are made by popular brands (like WD, LaCie, etc.) are notorious for having these "features" built into their firmware. WD has a long history of favoring power efficiency over convenience. As such, they should be avoided in favor of vanilla enclosures and the purchase of your own drive.
Connecting the drives to your machine is a way to test if it's the hub or not. But if they are traditional HDDs from WD or another high profile brand, you're stuck with that. There are workarounds to write to the drive every x seconds to prevent parking the heads, but those have mixed results. Moreover, I think WDs official position has always been it's normal. This issue dates back some 25 years and is the reason I stopped using branded enclosures from the companies above.
The only really solution to fix this is to disable the sleep mode of the Mac. The on/off problem will start, after an Apple Silicon Mac wake up from sleep.
Manually Sleep also bring back the on/off issue. So Shut down your Mac if you don't use it. Only solution is not use Mac sleep anymore.
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Hello, I have Mac Studio M1 base model Sonoma 14.7 and LaCie D2 Pro 16TB external HDD connected directly to Mac Studio using the original LaCie USB-C cable. In MacOs disabled option to spin down HDD and also enabled option not to sleep when screen off. The external HDD is stubbornly spinning down right after its up then down. Makes it really difficult to edit video in FinalCut Pro or even watch video from file stored on the external HDD as it pauses again and again to wait for the HDD to spin up.
I've tried this, which should disable disk sleep altogether, but it did not help:
Disabling sleep all together however fixes the problem:
The price I pay is lack of auto sleep. In my case it is acceptable. I am putting the system into sleep whenever I want it to and I only leave it running when I want it to run.
Still really sad how badly it is made. Almost as if Apple have decided to reduce the lifespan of external HDD-s on purpose. We all know spin-up is the most stressful for most drives and they have so much more hours to run continuously without issues whereas they have a very limited number of spinup-down cycles before they begin to fail. Basically Apple is killing HDDs en masse.
Bash:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 0Disabling sleep all together however fixes the problem:
Bash:
sudo pmset -a sleep 0The price I pay is lack of auto sleep. In my case it is acceptable. I am putting the system into sleep whenever I want it to and I only leave it running when I want it to run.
Still really sad how badly it is made. Almost as if Apple have decided to reduce the lifespan of external HDD-s on purpose. We all know spin-up is the most stressful for most drives and they have so much more hours to run continuously without issues whereas they have a very limited number of spinup-down cycles before they begin to fail. Basically Apple is killing HDDs en masse.