MP 1,1-5,1 Internal HDDs stay spinning after unmounting in Big Sur

[Sharky II]

Hi all,

I've started running Big Sur for a few projects and it's running well.

I have 4x internal HDDs (backup drives), a PCIe AHCI drive (currently hosting my 'main' Mojave installation), and a regular, small 'test' SSD running Big Sur connected to the DVD player SATA, and finally I also have another internal SSD connected to the other DVD bay SATA connector.

One small 'issue' I've encountered is that when I eject all the HDDs, they don't spin down like they do in Mojave. I have a very quiet music studio and notice a clear difference in sound. The pulsating noise is quite annoying when you're used to SSD 'silence'.

I tried to tick the 'Put Hard Disks To Sleep When Possible' and this made at least one of them spin down, but then I can immediately hear it spin up again a second or two later.

Has anybody else experienced this - is this a Big Sur issue, an OpenCore issue (i.e. a bug as our machines aren't really meant to run Big Sur), or, is it just something off with my settings, or my machine?

Thanks,

Ed

Spec: Mac Pro 4,1 -> 5,1 2 x 6-core 3.46GHz CPU, Sapphire Pulse RX 580 8GB, 48GB Ram, Big Sur 11.6.1. Updated after SurPlus fix was integrated into Martin's OpenCore config.

 

[Sharky II]

Just bumping this in case anybody had any suggestions!

Or at least, is this normal/expected behaviour? Does your Mac Pro allow drives to spin down completely when unmounted/ejected in Big Sur?

 

[bsbeamer]

Big Sur 11.6.1 (20G224) on iMac/MBP machines does the same with HDDs as external. Have them constantly plugged in for TimeMachine hourly backup (in addition to CCC on other drives separately) and it takes at least several minutes to spin down after ejecting, if leaving connected. Does not fully power down unless physically disconnected. Sometimes they'll "kick" back into a low power activity mode of some kind. This is likely a combo of firmware on drives/controller and macOS Big Sur.

Generally speaking, NVMe and SATA SSD behave a lot better with Big Sur than any HDD. Likely won't be on Monterey until February/March 2022. Not sure if any of this is resolved or addressed there.

 

[Sharky II]

Thanks for that - I'm surprised there's not a bigger reaction to it, but then I suppose it's mainly 5,1 owners who have spinning internal drives. 7,1 owners probably don't bother with internal spinners, but it's still really weird to me that there's an option to 'spin down' hard drives in the Energy Saving preferences if it doesn't actually do anything...

Plenty of people are still using spinning HDDs!