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External USB Hard Drive spins up/down all the time

I got the same error as wiregen when I tried to unload the kext. Logical that if the kext is in use it won't let you unload it. A quick look for how to get around that makes it look a little bit painful (rebooting into recovery mode, disabling SIP, unload then move the kext, etc.). Not sure if I'm up for that quite yet unless there's already evidence it will fix the problem.
 
Auream said:
(rebooting into recovery mode, disabling SIP, unload then move the kext, etc.).
Click to expand...
Don’t even try to do that, those instructions are not for Monterey.
It’s probably not possible to unload AppleUSBXDCIARM because there are other devices connected to the internal USB controller (the camera).
Here is a diagnostics command that might offer some info
kmutil print-diagnostics --plugins -p /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBDeviceFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns
There are some utilities that can control the power of the USB ports of hubs, but I’m not sure if it will make any difference in this case https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl
 
Auream said:
WD Elements EasyStore 8TB USB 3 hard drive
Click to expand...
My WD MyBook external HDDs (and I believe all other consumer WD HDDs), park their heads after 7 or 8 seconds. This is to save energy and can work well for some drive use patterns. I have always found it terrible with an average of about 1 un-parks per minute - that is ~500,000 per year on my always running iMac.

This is problematic for two reasons:
1) Pauses whenever the drive is accessed and needs to wake (unpark);
2) Drive can start to go bad after about 300,000 such events.

The parking behaviour is part of the firmware on the drive - nothing to do with macOS or whether the USB port is powered. I have never seen mention of a macOS way of changing this behaviour. But it can be changed (I have not done so) with a bootable USB loaded with WDidle3. I have not searched for this recently, so will not add out of date links. Search for "WD head parking".

My solution is to keep the heads flying and the drive spinning all the time with a python script that accesses the drive every 7 seconds. You can also use Keep Drive Spinning (Safari may complain because link is not https) and its Google Group.
 
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gilby101 said:
My WD MyBook external HDDs (and I believe all other consumer WD HDDs), park their heads after 7 or 8 seconds. This is to save energy and can work well for some drive use patterns. I have always found it terrible with an average of about 1 un-parks per minute - that is ~500,000 per year on my always running iMac.
Click to expand...
This is not the heads parking, it's the drive spinning down (the actual main motor going from spinning at 5400RPM to 0RPM). I know this sound well because it is normal to occur when e.g. I unmount the drive, or sleep/power down my Mac. Also, it then usually spins back up within a few seconds. Definitely not normal and did not happen on my previous Mac.
 
Auream said:
This is not the heads parking, it's the drive spinning down
Click to expand...
The 'feature' is called IntelliPark by WD and, in forums, is referred to as Head Parking. And, yes, the drive spins down after parking the heads. Whatever we call it, the fix is WDIDLE3 or something to write to the drive frequently enough to stop it.

If you have a SMART utility you can read the "Load Cycle Count" to see how often it is happening.

For command line utility you can use smartmontools (which can also be installed with homebrew). DriveDX is an excellent GUI tool (but not free). Both use the same kext to read SMART data.
 
My issue isnt with mechanical drives its with all my sandisk SSDs. I have 2x 4TB sandisk 2.5" ssds in an external enclosure and a 2tb sandisk extreme portable SSD. All 3 do the same thing where they sleep within seconds
 
gilby101 said:
The 'feature' is called IntelliPark by WD and, in forums, is referred to as Head Parking. And, yes, the drive spins down after parking the heads. Whatever we call it, the fix is WDIDLE3 or something to write to the drive frequently enough to stop it.
Click to expand...
Just looked up Intellipark. It doesn’t say anything about spinning down the drive, just parking the heads: https://www.instantfundas.com/2011/12/intellipark-makes-western-digital-green.html. This definitely is a bug on the macos/MacBook side, not head parking. I’ve also used the same hard drive for over a year on Catalina and never had this problem.
 
I don’t think “None” is a normal power state for an USB port.
I’ve connected an old, defective hard drive using an USB 3.0 enclosure. The hard spins, makes a horrible noise, it’s not readable by the OS and eventually stops. At no point the USB port is in a “None” state of power, it’s USEABLE even after the spinning stops and the drive is completely silent.
Same with an USB stick, even when ejected from Finder or Disk Utility, the USB port it’s still in an USEABLE state until the stick gets physically disconnected and the port goes into LOW_POWER.
And some information from the open sourced PowerManagement
https://opensource.apple.com/source...Management-1132.141.1/pmset/pmset.c.auto.html

Code: 
is_on = (CFDictionaryGetValue(dict, kIOPMNodeIsPowerOn) == kCFBooleanTrue) ? true : false;
        is_usable = (CFDictionaryGetValue(dict, kIOPMNodeIsDeviceUsable) == kCFBooleanTrue) ? true : false;
        is_lowpower = (CFDictionaryGetValue(dict, kIOPMNodeIsLowPower) == kCFBooleanTrue) ? true : false;



        printf("%-25s %3d  %9d  ", dname_buf, cur_st, max_st);
        if ( (is_on || is_usable || is_lowpower) == false) printf("None\n");
        else {
            bool comma = false;
            if (is_on) {
                printf("ON");
                comma = true;
            }
            if (is_usable) {
                if (comma) printf(",");
                printf("USEABLE");
                comma = true;
            }
            if (is_lowpower) {
                if (comma) printf(",");
                printf("LOW_POWER");
            }
            printf("\n");
        }
        if (dict) CFRelease(dict);
        return ;

and from IOKitUser
https://opensource.apple.com/source....6/pwr_mgt.subproj/IOPMLibPrivate.h.auto.html

Code: 
* Keys used in the dictionary returned by IOPMCopyPowerStateInfo()
 */
#define kIOPMNodeCurrentState                 CFSTR("CurrentState")
#define kIOPMNodeMaxState                     CFSTR("MaxState")
#define kIOPMNodeIsPowerOn                    CFSTR("IsPowerOn")
#define kIOPMNodeIsDeviceUsable               CFSTR("IsDeviceUsable")
#define kIOPMNodeIsLowPower                   CFSTR("IsLowPower")

The users affected should consider reporting the problem to Apple, at the Hardware Products section https://www.apple.com/feedback/
 
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This problem seems to have mysteriously stopped. Put my ear to the hard drive and its clearly still spinning and hasn't done its usual spin down/up dance in the past 30+ minutes. I have rebooted once or twice since this all started, but no macOS updates were installed. I had previously rebooted a few times between messing with the power management settings and plists and the problem had continued, so clearly just rebooting alone wasn't enough to clear it.

In any event, for the time being I'm enjoying relative peace, but I'll update if the problem comes back.
 
I can also say my issue randomly stopped also. What the heck?

So now using FCPX on both my home and my office using 2 of my external drives none of them are instantly sleeping anymore.

?‍♂️
 
Auream said:
macOS Monterey 12.1 on a new M1 MacBook Air with a WD Elements EasyStore 8TB USB 3 hard drive. I specifically turned off "Put Hard Disks to sleep when possible" in the Battery preference pane (on both battery and power adapter modes just to be sure). This worked fine on my previous iMac (running Catalina 10.15) and I never heard the drive spin down. This appears to be broken now, because the drive spins up and down constantly, every few minutes. Not only is it annoying, I'm sure this is terrible for the lifetime of the drive. It appears other people have been seeing this since Big Sur as well:
forums.macrumors.com

External USB HD constantly spinning up/down 11.6.1.

Anyone else noticing this? I updated from 11.6 to 11.6.1 on Monday. Today I'm noticing that my WD Elements desktop drive keeps on spinning down and up. Its externally powered and plugged directly into a USB port on my M1 iMac. I had no problems prior to the update. Example from this evening -...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

Anyone else seeing this? Anyone know of a fix?
Click to expand...

Just found your thread via googling the same issue...
–Monterey 12.2.1 (21D62)
–Mac Mini M1
–G-DRIVE 10TB via direct connection (USB3)

Spins down and comes back all the time...

– Disabled 'Put Hard Disks to sleep whenever possible' didn't help
– Terminal commands such as "sudo pmset -a disksleep 0" etc. didn't help
– "Keep Drive Spinning" App doesn't work
– Used different USB-C cables, nothing changed

Strange thing tho' is that after a restart, it's running for a while, like even an hour, and when I start working with Adobe Bridge and Google Chrome, the disk starts playing this stupid game.

I'll get back if there's any solution....... ??
 
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There's definitely something still messed up with mine on Monterey. It does seem to have stopped the constant spin up/down, but instead it seems to often get into this bad, unresponsive state where trying to access volumes on the disk just shows them as empty (or sometimes the top-level folders show up, but with nothing inside them). I presume it might be the disk is spun down, and isn't spinning up when trying to access it in the Finder. Luckily this only seems to happen after a fairly long period of being idle and it can be fixed by either rebooting or unmounting and remounting the drive. But its still annoying.
 
Auream said:
There's definitely something still messed up with mine on Monterey. It does seem to have stopped the constant spin up/down, but instead it seems to often get into this bad, unresponsive state where trying to access volumes on the disk just shows them as empty (or sometimes the top-level folders show up, but with nothing inside them). I presume it might be the disk is spun down, and isn't spinning up when trying to access it in the Finder. Luckily this only seems to happen after a fairly long period of being idle and it can be fixed by either rebooting or unmounting and remounting the drive. But its still annoying.
Click to expand...
Try disabling auto sleep and *only* put the Mac to sleep manually. I suspect the unresponsive state will disappear. I had the fact issue and was able to trace to auto sleep 100% of the time. Disabling auto sleep made the issue go away permanently.

Now, if I could just get my external enclosure to Alston spinning up every few minutes, I’d be in business.
 
No in my case it can’t be auto sleep, I have the “prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping” checkbox checked and “put hard disks to sleep when possible” unchecked.
 
I just noticed this on mine (m1 mini, big sur). The external drives are spinning down after *40 seconds*, which is (imho) insane.
 
Could this be due to the new optimized charging options where the battery stops charging at a certain point when plugged in? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212049

Could this be causing the disks to sleep since it is technically running on battery? If this seems viable....maybe a solution can be investigated with this in mind?
 
I am increasingly convinced hard drive issues like these are macOS bugs. I've got a 2-drive RAID that works perfectly fine (for years) connected to Intel Macs. Moved it to new Studio Ultra and I'm lucky if it remains connected for 3 hours. It "unexpectedly ejects" on just about every sleep but will also do that when definitely NOT sleeping... even while exchanging files with it (so both Mac and the Drive are definitely awake).

I've tried every deducing thing I can try: new cables, both USB-A and USB-C jacks, messing with power/sleep settings, even the sudo command to put the maximum number in disk sleep. Move the drive & same cable back to Intel Macs and enjoy a stable, continuous connection. Bring it back to Studio Ultra (clean install) and it is unlikely to make it 3 hours.

If you do a search for macOS Monterey and "unexpected ejection," you will find LOTS of threads in lots of places including on Apple's own support forums. That's all kinds of external drives hooked to Monterey Macs using all kinds of cables. Curiously, there seems to be good numbers that do NOT seem affected too, but hopefully this is on an Apple debugging list.

It's a very frustrating problem. Wasn't USB on the very first iMacs more than 20 years ago? What does the U in USB stand for again? It would seem dependable USB functionality would have been debugged long ago.
 
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Have started having this problem with my WD MyBook 20TB since having my iMac 2019's HDD replaced under warranty. I upgraded to 12.3.1 around the same time so that could be the issue?
 
I have a Mac Studio M1 Ultra, as well as a MBP M1 Max. I've also got a work issued late-2019 Intel MBP.

I purchased a new G-Tech G-drive to use for Time Machine backups with the Mac Studio (it's a WD Ultrastar drive inside).

I was noticing that the G-drive would spin up, the spin down... then a few minutes later, the drive would spin back up, spin back down.

Time Machine wasn't actively backing up while this was happening, so I figured maybe Spotlight indexing or something.

I tried disabling the power option "Put hard drives to sleep if possible", but that didn't do anything. I verified that the power management setting was being disabled in the power management settings via the Terminal.

In order to stop the drive from spinning down, I tried the App "Amphetamine", which has an option where it'll write a tiny file to a disk periodically to keep it up. Even that didn't work, the drive still spins down and back up frequently.

Things got really interesting when I just ejected the drive (unmounted it from macOS). Just sitting idle, while connected to the Mac Studio, the drive would spin up and down every few minutes to ten minutes or so.

I then tried to connect the drive to my M1 Max MBP, and I saw the exact same behavior. The drive spins down and up with fairly high frequency, without even being mounted in macOS.

So then I connected the G-Drive to my work Intel MBP, and voila! The drive's spin-up/spin-down behavior is as you'd expect: It stays up as long as you use it, then macOS spins it down, and it stays down unless absolutely needed.

So it seems like it's an Apple Silicon/macOS bug.

I tried connecting the drive to external USB hubs, a Thunderbolt 3 dock, and nothing seems to fix that spin-up/spin-down behavior on the Apple Silicon machines, but it works just fine on the Intel Mac.

For now I'm just leaving the disk disconnected unless I need it, as I don't want the drive to die.

I found a similar thread on Apple's community forums and it seems to be a pretty common issue.
 
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^ As mentioned in another thread I used the WD utility to disable the in-built sleep setting on the drive, then also disabled "Put hard disks to sleep when possible". Now the drive only wakes up when the Mac does, and sleeps when the Mac sleeps.

Not ideal, but assuming it's a macOS issue it will suffice until it's fixed.
 
I have also been having this problem with my Thunderbay. All the disks will spin down after a while even though I have that setting turned off in the power settings.
 
Interestingly I have the opposite with my Ministack STX, the thing never sleeps, so the cooling fan spins continuously, even when I sleep the Mac Studio. This is the case whether there are any drives in the STX or not and whether the drives are mounted or not. It just spins the fans all the time. As soon as I unplug the TB cable, it spins down.

This is a new behaviour since "upgrading" to 12.4 from 12.3.1. The 12.5 beta is no better.

The fan is irritatingly loud to have running when the drives aren't being accessed.
 
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Don't suppose the final release of 12.4 has made any difference for anyone?
 
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