External drive constantly spinning down and up

I'm curious if you ever found any answers regarding your external drive? Judging by the number of people on other forums/communities complaining of similar problems with MacOs, I would say it's a fairly common issue. I have the same thing happen with my primary external drive going to sleep after only about 40 seconds as well as the drive spins up for about a minute every so often even while the M2 MacMini is sleeping, regardless of the energy settings. Additionally, Spotlight is unable to index entire drive, again, regardless of method used to cause re-indexing. This has been an issue ever since upgrading to Ventura and it is regardless of brand of hard drive and regardless of drive formatting. I have several different brands and it hasn't mattered which one is connected. I have most recently been working with Western Digital regarding a newly purchased drive and they finally asked me to send it back to see if a replacement would work any better (haven't received it yet).

John Galt is probably right in saying that Apple has moved on from hard drives, but at current prices, many, if not most, of us cannot afford an SSD for large storage needs. I've been using Macs for about 30 years, and upgrading to a M2 MacMini was the best upgrade I've ever done except for the headache of using my external drives.

In saying all that, the second reason I was responding was to say that a lot of people have resorted to using an app like Amphetamine to keep their drive "alive" in order to get any work accomplished. Not ideal, IMHO, but it does help. Activating "keep drive alive" in the Amphetamine quick prefs is a simple, if not perfect solution.

Hi,

Same problem here too. Had it with a 2019 iMac With an OWC raid.

Got a new Studio M1 Ultra. Connected directly via Thunderbolt. Same problem. It is so bad the drive will spin down while music player is playing, causing a gap in the music.

Tried a Sansdisk raid. Same problem.

Now on a Qnap raid. Same Problem.

Tried all the suggested tricks. Amphetamine does not keep the drive alive.

This is utter BS. I think I'm about done with Apple. Looking for a better solution.

The behaviour you describe is usually controlled by the drive's firmware — which is usually something beyond any ability for you or the Mac to control. It may even be a requirement of overzealous regulatory agencies that require consumer electronic devices to assume a low power state whenever possible.

You can consult the hard disk drive's manufacturer, who may offer a utility that can modify those settings. Most of those utilities are for Windows PCs though.

Follow up from my earlier post: I received a replacement drive from Western Digital. It made little, if any, difference. Drive goes to sleep shortly after awakening while computer is on and comes on spontaneously periodically while computer is asleep. Occasionally and randomly, external drive will stay awake while computer is on, without having to use Amphetamine "keep drive alive". Cannot connect to any particular apps, work situations, etc. Additionally, Spotlight still cannot index the new external drive completely. It works on some things, but doesn't on a lot of others. Some folders can be searched individually, some cannot. End up using Find Any File quite often.

I understand the behavior is annoying. If LaCie has no way to control that annoying behavior then there may be nothing you can do about it.

There are several reasons it may be a futile attempt. macOS's Spotlight processes are going to index connected storage devices as a background task, which means there will be periods of time during which it has no need to access that drive. Apparently LaCie interprets that as a signal to power it down, probably to meet ill-conceived energy saving mandates. Of course they don't consider the additional energy involved to spin up the drive or the consequences of premature device failures adding to landfills or the expense required to replace them when they fail, but regulatory agencies have decided what's best and that's the end of that.

The other reason is that Apple already relegated disk drives to irrelevance years ago. Everything they do is designed to use solid state storage, so Apple is not going to devote much effort into doing anything at all with disk drives.

Normally I would suggest using lsof to determine which files are being accessed followed by determining the reason, followed by determining if the responsible processes could be suspended. However, you are using that drive for work files, so you already know the reason. It just shouldn't go to sleep prematurely. If the idle / spin-down time is already coded in firmware at some arbitrary fixed number of minutes that does not take into effect how often you use the drive, then it's a half-baked idea.

Maybe another brand of drive wouldn't do that. I don't have anything in particular to recommend though. LaCie is a reputable manufacturer, but there are other reputable manufacturers.

There is almost certainly a way to defeat that annoying behavior, but it might not be possible for an end user to accomplish.

I have several generations of LaCie (but not the same Big Dock unit you have) and Western Digital and Apricorn external hard drives in use on multiple computers running Ventura, and one running Monterey. None of them have the spin down and spin up issue you describe. All are configured to allow external hard drives to sleep (which appears to be the default).

You could try setting your computer energy settings such that the COMPUTER never sleeps (dimming the screen can be allowed, the computer is still active). This might change the hard drive behavior, although it might not.

You should probably update to Ventura, every new version of the MacOS fixes "quirks" and issues with the older ones.

Finally, if you have any anti-virus, security, VPN, "cleaner" or similar utilities or tools that do any type of monitoring either of the computer or network, those can cause unwanted spin ups because they check things every so often. You could run the Etrecheck diagnostic tool and post the results here using Additional text button below. That is like "crowd sourcing" the diagnosis to many people with all kinds of Mac expertise.

Keep in mind that by using an older (Monterey) MacOS you will experience behaviors that might well be different under Ventura.

An aside: the replaceable hard drive setup with your LaCie product is an interesting one, but I suspect that the behavior you are seeing is governed more by the enclosure firmware than by the actual manufacturer of the bare drive itself. The LaCie external drive I use (for Time Machine backups) does noticeably spin up when first connected but then either stays running (as indicated by a light on the enclosure) or spins down for an extended period of time but then does spin up but only when a Time Machine backup takes place, once per hour.

Another possibility is that the software you are using (InDesign) needs to "touch" the drive where the files are every minute or so, that will force the drive to spin up. How to test this: maybe connect the drive but run no software at all, just let the computer sit with just the Finder operating, does the spin up/down cycle still happen? If the behavior is due to the application you are using, then you might be out of luck unless you use one of those "caffeine" type applications that keeps all drives running all the rime.

I get this with an OWC miniStack, Seagate drive (I think, it's hard to tell). It makes a horrble squeaky noise when it spins down, so I leave the drive turned off most of the time :-( m1 mini (so no battery settings involved), both Ventura and Sonoma)

I have the same issue also with an older LaCie external USB drive. I have had the issue with both its original 2Tb drive and newer 4Tb drive I put in the enclosure last week. Interestingly (although not sure if this is a result of TimeMachine), I placed the original 2Tb drive in a new external bay I got from amazon - a budget UGREEN enclosure and I do not get any such issues with that drive now in this enclosure, although as I mentioned earlier, this is setup as my TimeMachine drive.

My LaCie has spun up and down 10 times during typing this - the UGREEN drive remains spun down.

Hi, yes it does spin down but then stays down until I physically do something that needs to access it. For me that ok. I don’t get the random constant spinning down then back up again repeatedly like I did with the LaCie - it’s got to be a LaCie controller issue.

Thia might have the answer you are looking for

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253654945

Nice! When the UGREEN is mounted, but not actively being used, does it spin down? That's the problem I'm having with the OWC enclosure, the drive is mounted, the spins down, and immediately back up, and down... (making a screaming noise when it spins down, which is apparently normal)