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augustcjc Author

Level 1

13 points

External HDD Spins Up & Down Constantly

Hello all, I've been round and round with tech support and have gotten nowhere with this. My external drives keep "going to sleep" like every 30 seconds or so...even while working off of them! The constant spin up and spin down is unbearable in Premiere Pro and makes it frustrating to work and get a project done. I thought is was my new Lacie 8TB BigDock drive failing so I moved everything over to my 10TB G-Drive and still experienced the same. I then connected my MacBook Pro and everything was fine. So that leads me to believe that there is something wrong with my Mac Studio. I have unchecked "put hard disks to sleep when possible", I've tried unplugging Studio from wall to reset the SMC....nothing has worked so far. Perhaps there's some sort of script missing that tells the drives they are currently in use?? Please help!!! Work has ground to a halt!

Current equipment: Mac Studio, M1 Max Chip, 64gb memory, running current version of Monterey.

Posted on Apr 16, 2022 11:00 AM

Top-ranking reply

Ryan0751

Level 1

78 points

Posted on May 8, 2022 3:29 AM

I'm seeing the same problem with a G-Tech G-Drive: The drive spins down, and up, and down, very frequently when connected to either my Mac Studio M1 Ultra OR my M1 Max MBP.

The drive spins up and down frequently as long as the drive is connected to the computer, it doesn't even have to be mounted in macOS.

If I plug the drive into my work provided Intel MBP, no issues at all.

There seems to be something broken in the way macOS is driving these USB devices on Apple Silicon.

I've tried to plug the drive into the Type-A USB ports on the Mac Studio, a CalDigit T3+ dock connected to the Mac Studio, a USB hub, etc. The problem happens with all of them, but never with the Intel Mac.

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External HDD Spins Up & Down Constantly

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