My external HDD is killing the performance of my M2 Studio

[Mark200789]

I have a new Mac Studio M2 Max with the extra cores and 64gb of ram. I'm not terribly impressed with the thing as a whole. I don't find it mind glowingly fast after my 2014 iMac 5k. But what's really killing me right now is how it accesses my 6TB external HDD. It's a western digital usb 3.0 drive. I had this drive on my previous machine with none of these problems. Now the drive seems to go to sleep after mere seconds of disuse. I have "put drives the sleep when possible" off in energy saver. The constant sleeping is a problem because I wanted to continue using it as a cache drive for photoshop, aftereffects, and audition. I've had to stop that because every few minutes of working on a project, especially in Audition, I'd have to wait through 20 seconds of beach ball spinning while the drive wakes. I've recently noticed that websites are not loading until the drive wakes. Like, why would that even happen? This is driving me absolutely batty and making my top of the line machine look worse than the 9 year old one that preceded it.

Quick reminder. Drive sleep is off. This was not a problem on my old iMac. The only time the iMac suffered from the drive waking was when using spotlight, opening a file, or using photoshop for the first time in a long while. Certainly never in the middle of actively working on something.

Edit, while posting this question the drive fell asleep and woke itself up before and after I clicked the button. This is insane.

 

[ColdCase]

Sounds like a poor or intermitent connection?

Try a different cable.

 

[BrianBaughn]

You can give the Caffeine app a try. I'm using it to try to keep a stack of hard drives, each in USB-connected housings, from doing what you describe. I didn't have a previous Mac setup in this manner to compare. I have a Mac Studio M1.

I said "try" because Caffiene's "keep drive alive", or whatever it's called, isn't working on one or more of them. I need to determine which one(s) aren't working. Even then I won't know if it's a housing/controller or a drive issue…unless I try swapping drives in housings and so forth.

 

[Mark200789]

Sounds like a poor or intermitent connection?

Try a different cable.

This is possible. I just got a new usbc cable for it. But wouldn’t it be unmounting and mounting again? Not just sleeping and waking? I’ll put the old one in and report back.

 

[wdhpgx]

My impression is that recent macos versions aggressively power down drives, and that the built-in macos configuration settings that used to disable that no longer disable that. I ended up installing and using Amphetamine to keep specific drives from powering down. Note that the method it uses is what I would call workaround and/or brute force; it just accesses the drive every X seconds to keep it powered up. But my impression is that that's the only real option available now that the os itself no longer seems to honor its configuration settings. (I'm on a m1 studio max running monterey.)

‎Amphetamine

‎Welcome to Amphetamine, the most awesome keep-awake app ever created for macOS. Amphetamine can keep your Mac, and optionally its display(s), awake through a super simple on/off switch, or automatically through easy-to-configure Triggers. Amphetamine is extremely powerful and includes advanced...

apps.apple.com

 

[ColdCase]

This is possible. I just got a new usbc cable for it. But wouldn’t it be unmounting and mounting again? Not just sleeping and waking? I’ll put the old one in and report back.

No the drive won't unmount but will confuse the OS, or require some CPU to resolve. wdhpgx has a more likely scenario for the latest OS's, however. One used to always blame a peripheral for these kinds of slow down, but the aggressive spin down adds another layer.

These kinds of things makes SSD so much more attractive than rotational. I have migrated completely to SSD in the workflow. Rotational for backup or archives. So much happier.

 

[wojtek.traczyk]

@Mark200789 My friendly long-perspective advice (if ’m reading correctly between lines of your post) guess it’s time to upgrade your setup a little bit more nvme ssd in usb 3.2 gen2 enclosure (or thunderbolt3 one, if you‘re ready for pay bit more). As a motion designer myself, I did it quite recently and - gosh - never going back to hdds as a daily work cache (with an except of backup purposes).
You’ll be surprised how fast such combination is. It will give your new Studio an assistance it needs to perform properly. Having an usb3.0 hdd as a cache drive for Adobe apps is dragging down performance of your setup a lot.

 

[Sun Baked]

I'd probably blame spotlight for the constant beach balls, turn everything off but docs and folders.

Then look at the SSDs.

 

[Shamgar]

I see similar behaviour with a hard drive in a thunderbolt enclosure. Spotlight results for all external drives are messed up for about 15 seconds while the drive is spinning up, and then it goes to sleep after something like 10 minutes. My only work around is to unmount the drive. The workhorses in that 4-bay enclosure are SATA SSDs that don't have that issue and I only need occasional access to the archives on that hard drive, so it works out for me. "Replace your external hard drive with an external SSD" isn't a great solution, but it is a solution.

 

[Fishrrman]

Just a thought, might not mean anything, but...

Does the WD drive have "internal" circuitry or a software setting that's designed to "put it to sleep" (i.e., spin down the platters) when communication with the computer isn't active?

This would be on the drive's controller board -- completely independent of the Mac.

I'm wondering if the WD drive settings software (available from WD's site) has a setting for this?

Again, just a thought...

 

[wojtek.traczyk]

The reason I went with unsolicited SSD advice here (tacky, I know ;-) is that my external enclosure (usb 3.1 gen 2, made by German/Chinese company Icybox, IB-1817M-C31; I got two of them) equipped with WD Blue NVME SSD (2tb and 1tb) are performing perfectly on my Intel MacBook Pro as a daily work cache. I’ve experienced no lags, no unwanted disconnects, stable transfers, and speed is satisfactory as well.

 

[Mark200789]

I just put the drive back on its old USB-A cable and attached it directly to the Mac Studio since it was linked through the studio display before. A bit later I did a web search and the browser hung while the drive spun up. I don't understand this at all. This isn't just an old USB3 drive being antiquated. Something in the OS is being stupid. There's zero reason safari needs the drive running to pull down a website

 

[ColdCase]

Does safari work fine when the drive is unplugged?

 

[wdhpgx]

I just put the drive back on its old USB-A cable and attached it directly to the Mac Studio since it was linked through the studio display before. A bit later I did a web search and the browser hung while the drive spun up. I don't understand this at all. This isn't just an old USB3 drive being antiquated. Something in the OS is being stupid. There's zero reason safari needs the drive running to pull down a website

I have had apps or processes pause to wait for my external drive to spin up, but it's not usual and not often. The cases where I've noticed it, it's been my impression that there was a symlink (to the external drive) in a directory that the app was accessing (I'm a shell user so I use symlinks rather than finder shortcuts; I don't know if finder shortcuts would act the same way in this case). I've since minimized the use of symlinks in places like my homedir and Desktop and directories like that that apps tend to often access. I want to say that's reduced the occurrences, but I also haven't done specific testing to find out.

 

[TECK]

The constant sleeping is a problem because I wanted to continue using it as a cache drive for photoshop, aftereffects, and audition.

I personally stopped using regular hard drives long time ago. For portability and speed, I use an NVMe external enclosure with no sleep issues in my Studio M2 Ultra, which has 1TB internal storage. For long term storage, I use my 74TB nas, with a 10GB network connection. The enclosure goes to sleep as intended, when my Mac goes to sleep, and wakes-up instantly when the Mac is back from sleep. Otherwise, it stays on, as intended. I can easily verify this, based on the green light present into external enclosure. I know some of NVMe enclosures don't work well in a Mac, I'm very happy with the Trebleet product.

 

[Mark200789]

I have the drive divided into two partitions. One for Time Machine and the other for caching, general storage. I unmounted the general/cache partition and left the Time Machine one. I believe the problem has stopped. I'd say something was accessing the drive in a bizarre way, but I'm not sure why it would put it to sleep in the middle of working on something or make Safari hiccup over it.

 

[ColdCase]

The drive is probably not sleeping but may be going bad. How many reallocated sectors are reported in the smart status?

 

[Mark200789]

The drive is probably not sleeping but may be going bad. How many reallocated sectors are reported in the smart status?

It doesn't have smart status. Which is weird because it's not that old a drive. But, it also doesn't explain why one partition is causing it and not the other, smaller more used one.

 

[Plutonius]

Older drives are more likely to go but any drive can fail.

 

[ColdCase]

Its more likely bad sectors are on the larger partition. The smaller partition may not be anywhere (physically) close to the bad platter area. Not saying this is your issue, just that there may be other explanations.

 

[handheldgames]

It doesn't have smart status. Which is weird because it's not that old a drive. But, it also doesn't explain why one partition is causing it and not the other, smaller more used one.

1) Make sure you disable "Put hard disks to sleep" in settings. Without this setting, there is a MASSIVE delay with any spotlight search.

2) By default, USB Drives don't have smart status on macos. DriveDX, a paid app with a demo trial has optional components you can install to achieve expanded smart status on your hard disks. Highly recommended. If you are encountering issues, I'd recommend a deep dive in partition health. (yes I know about the issues.. whoops).

Coming from a 5,1 Mac Pro, I also needed HDD enclosure and have 2 OWC Thunderbay 4 TB3 enclosures that were picked up from ebay at substantial discounts over new. Have picked up a couple WD ultrastar helium based drives from ServerPartDeals.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote in reply 16 above:
"I have the drive divided into two partitions. One for Time Machine and the other for caching, general storage. I unmounted the general/cache partition and left the Time Machine one. I believe the problem has stopped"

My suggestion:
Don't use a platter-based USB3 drive for "caching".

For that, you need an SSD - faster.

I'd suggest that you get another drive for the "non-time machine" partition of the WD drive.

Move these contents to an SSD, then DELETE the non-tm partition and use the entire drive for time machine only.

For an SSD, I'd suggest you investigate the Samsung t7 "shield".
Nice, small, fast, and may still be "on sale" at amazon.

I used to be a "build it yourself" guy insofar as external drives went.
But the t7 drive has "won me over" to the "buy it and just use it" side...

 

[yadmonkey]

FWIW, I use a trad HDD in a USB drive dock for Time Machine and have had zero issues on my M2 Max Studio. Went SSD for everything else and for the first time in my life, I haven't ever noticed the OS hang while a HDD spins up. I'd agree that caching to a HDD is problematic and it sounds like maybe that was the culprit, no?

 

[NinoSantos]

I have a new Mac Studio M2 Max with the extra cores and 64gb of ram. I'm not terribly impressed with the thing as a whole. I don't find it mind glowingly fast after my 2014 iMac 5k. But what's really killing me right now is how it accesses my 6TB external HDD. It's a western digital usb 3.0 drive. I had this drive on my previous machine with none of these problems. Now the drive seems to go to sleep after mere seconds of disuse. I have "put drives the sleep when possible" off in energy saver. The constant sleeping is a problem because I wanted to continue using it as a cache drive for photoshop, aftereffects, and audition. I've had to stop that because every few minutes of working on a project, especially in Audition, I'd have to wait through 20 seconds of beach ball spinning while the drive wakes. I've recently noticed that websites are not loading until the drive wakes. Like, why would that even happen? This is driving me absolutely batty and making my top of the line machine look worse than the 9 year old one that preceded it.

Quick reminder. Drive sleep is off. This was not a problem on my old iMac. The only time the iMac suffered from the drive waking was when using spotlight, opening a file, or using photoshop for the first time in a long while. Certainly never in the middle of actively working on something.

Edit, while posting this question the drive fell asleep and woke itself up before and after I clicked the button. This is insane.

I have a Mac Studio M1 Max and I am having the same issue with my WD 36Tb My Book Duo. It keeps doing this spinning and humming everytime I try to perform any task, it doesn't have to be a task that involves it (the external disk) like saving, or opening a file. Lately it has been doing more and more, and each time it goes into this "spinning" cicle I lose about 30 second because the computer freezes and I can't do anything.

 

[Fishrrman]

"The constant sleeping is a problem because I wanted to continue using it as a cache drive for photoshop, aftereffects, and audition. I've had to stop that because every few minutes of working on a project, especially in Audition, I'd have to wait through 20 seconds of beach ball spinning while the drive wakes."

Hmmm....
You don't really want to do stuff like this with a platter-based hard drive.

Suggestion:
Have you tried using the internal SSD for this? It will be faster than ANYTHING you can connect externally.

Next suggestion:
Use a 1tb SSD connected via USBc as your cache drive.

Either buy one "ready to go" (I'm thinking something like a Samsung t7 shield), or buy an nvme "blade" SSD and a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure and "build your own".

It won't be as fast as "internal caching", but it certainly will be a world apart from using a platter-based drive.