My external HDD is killing the performance of my M2 Studio

[niteflyr]

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 had the same problem with WD ext. HDD's for years. It drove me nuts. I finally got upset enough to call WD support today. It seems that WD ext. drives have internal settings which include drive sleep. Apparently the default is 'sleep timer on". WD has a utilities app you can down load here to check those settings. So far it seems that turning that sleep timer off, along with hard disk sleep off in energy saver settings, has had the desired results.

If you have more than 1 WD ext. drive, you have to do this to each drive.

 

[jaehaerys48]

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".

This. People typically use SSDs for caching on HDD systems. Not the other way around.

 

[Phil77354]

.... 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...

Although the OP hasn't returned to this thread for a while, the topic is an interesting one to me and I agree 100% with @Fishrrman regarding use of SSDs for external storage.

Heck, after spending some serious money for a new Studio setup, why not upgrade your external storage as well?

That is what I have done - sitting next to my new Studio Mac are a couple of Samsung SSDs (one new 4TB t7 "shield" and one older 1TB t7). I'm watching the prices on Amazon and will get another "shield" as soon as the price drops.

I also have a new WD 5TB for backups, but it is probably the last non-SSD eternal drive I'll purchase.