iMac external drive continually spinning down

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iMac external drive continually spinning down

I recently purchased a New iMac (M1 chip 2021) running Big Sur. I have two external drives connected to it. These external drives are the drives I primarily work off of due to storage limitations of the internal hard drive.

The problem I'm having is that the drives continually spin down when connected - basically after 1-2 minutes of "inactivity". This makes it impossible to work on programs like After Effects or Adobe Audition without having to stop and wait for the drives to spin up every 1-2 minutes. This is not a case of the drives going to sleep after an hour of inactivity - it happens within minutes - even while working in the programs.

I went into the Preferences pane and unchecked "put hard disk to sleep when possible" option and I also checked "prevent hard disks from sleeping automatically when the display is off." Also this was not an issue with the previous computer a 2013 MacPro desktop.

Has anyone else had this issue? Is there a setting somewhere that I'm missing which will keep the drives spinning for longer?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Posted on Jun 8, 2021 1:44 PM

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Answer 1

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Meg The Dog

Level 6

13,591 points

Jun 8, 2021 3:03 PM in response to JoshK8

After you made those Preference changes, did you restart your computer?

I frequently have a lot of external drives, some from clients, hooked up to my iMac. I also use AE quite a bit.

In my experience some drives ignore the energy saver settings and go to sleep on their own.

For many years I have used Disksomnia from the App Store to keep the drives spinning so that they do not sleep on their own.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/disksomnia/id834049984?mt=12

MtD

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Answer 2

JoshK8 Author

Level 1

14 points

Jun 8, 2021 11:11 PM in response to tbirdvet

Yes, when I can afford 12 TB of SSDs I'd much prefer that. I guess my question though is that the drives were fine on the earlier computer so I'm less likely to think it's an issue with the drives. It's possible that something happened to both enclosures/drives between switching computers but that seems improbable.

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