MacOS Server spinning up drives unnecessarily?

[stiligFox]

I have an issue that’s starting to bother me a good bit. I have a 2012 Mac mini running Sierra Server that acts as a VPN proxy, time machine backup for the house, and media server.

I have the OS and VPN networking stuff on an SSD.The Time Machine storage is on one external HDD, and the media is on another.

My problem is that every hour or so the drives are spun up for no reason - every other device on the network is shut off so it’s not that something on the network is trying to access those disks, and Time Machine on the Mac mini itself is disabled, so it’s not trying to back itself up. Why does it keep waking up the drives for no good reason? I’m afraid all these extra spin ups are only going to wear out my drive faster...

I have a brand new 14TB external drive that I plugged into it - nothing at all is stored on it yet, and it too was subjected to this frequent waking up by the OS, so I’ve unplugged it for now. Is there a way to stop macOS from doing this?

 

[satcomer]

Depends! it could be a service checking on folder or file change! Or it could be someone is stealing your VPN Server weak password! Consider a change of a complex password on that VPN Service!

 

[stiligFox]

Depends! it could be a service checking on folder or file change! Or it could be someone is stealing your VPN Server weak password! Consider a change of a complex password on that VPN Service!

Thanks!

VPN isn’t it - it’s actualy a proxy for the local network for devices to connect through ProtonVPN. Only way for someone to steal it would be if they were in my house, connected through the Ethernet haha. And the password is quite strong...

Any way I can find what services my be waking them up?

 

[sevoneone]

Are the Macs on your network shutdown or in sleep mode? Because this sounds like Power Nap. Any Mac that is plugged into AC power while sleeping and has Power Nap enabled will wake up to run scheduled Time Machine backups, which run once an hour.

Time Machine backups are stored in a file share and, in my experience, any file share activity tends to spin up all drives attached to a system. Even the ones that do not contain any shared files/folders.

 

[stiligFox]

Are the Macs on your network shutdown or in sleep mode? Because this sounds like Power Nap. Any Mac that is plugged into AC power while sleeping and has Power Nap enabled will wake up to run scheduled Time Machine backups, which run once an hour.

Time Machine backups are stored in a file share and, in my experience, any file share activity tends to spin up all drives attached to a system. Even the ones that do not contain any shared files/folders.

When this is happening, every device on the network is fully powered off; I thought maybe that was it but I was sure to rule that out.

macOS Server has a caching service, which I had turned off, but was pointed to the drive that spins up. I turned it back on, pointed it to the internal SSD, and then turned it back off; I wonder if that might fix it and if the caching service was actually still running to some degree (There was 140GB of cached data that I don't recall being there)

 

[satcomer]

Thanks!

VPN isn’t it - it’s actualy a proxy for the local network for devices to connect through ProtonVPN. Only way for someone to steal it would be if they were in my house, connected through the Ethernet haha. And the password is quite strong...

Any way I can find what services my be waking them up?

That means you connect to a SEVER and they get hacked all the time! In fact that happens more than reported!

Also use the free app TinkerTool to stop those darn .dsstore files from Mac OS on networked shares! Lastly stop SpotLight from indexing network shares too by blocking this shares in System Preferences->Spotlight pane!