Is there a way to keep External Hard Drives sleeping when I just want to access my iMac HDD?

[jman995x]

One thing that I've noticed about Mac that drives me crazy is when I've been working on something for awhile and my External Hard Drives go to sleep, and then I click on my Mac's HD, or just want to save a document to my iMac's HD, my computer wakes/spins up all of my External Hard Drives thinking I MIGHT want to access them too...which I DON'T.

Is there any way to not spin up my External Hard Drives until I actually need them (ie: leave them mounted, but don't spin them up every time I want to save a document to my iMac)?

Thanks,

J.

 

[chscag]

What make - model are the hard drives? I can leave mine attached and they do not wake up unless I access them. I have two Samsung T5s and a LaCie.

Usually it's the built in firmware of the drive that causes it to wake up. No sure if there is a way not to wake them up and keep them mounted at the same time.

 

[jman995x]

What make - model are the hard drives? I can leave mine attached and they do not wake up unless I access them. I have two Samsung T5s and a LaCie.

Usually it's the built in firmware of the drive that causes it to wake up. No sure if there is a way not to wake them up and keep them mounted at the same time.

I have:
1 x Fantom 10TB,
1 x LaCie 6TB 2Big Dock, Raid 0, and
1 x LaCie 16TB 2Big Dock, Raid 0

 

[MBAmtloin]

Is there anything open on the external hard drives?
are we running time machine while the ex HD are plugged in?

I see a flashing light on some of my exHDs but only when they are in use.
the drives i am using are not as large or same models as yours though.
i did not notice this activity in Windows 10 either, they react when called upon.

I hope this helped

 

[jman995x]

Is there anything open on the external hard drives?
are we running time machine while the ex HD are plugged in?

I see a flashing light on some of my exHDs but only when they are in use.
the drives i am using are not as large or same models as yours though.
i did not notice this activity in Windows 10 either, they react when called upon.

I hope this helped

I might have a Finder folder open on one or some of the External HDs, but I'm not using that Finder window, or any document therein.
One of them is dedicated for Time Machine, but I have it disabled so that it only does it when I manually instruct it to do so.

 

[ferrarr]

It may also have to do with your model and year of your iMac? Older models, may not communicate the same way as the newer models do.

 

[chscag]

I have:
1 x Fantom 10TB,
1 x LaCie 6TB 2Big Dock, Raid 0, and
1 x LaCie 16TB 2Big Dock, Raid 0

I'm not familiar with those drives but I'm betting its their firmware that's causing them to spin up when they sense activity on the iMac. Not sure there is anything you can do to prevent them from spinning up.

It would not be very practical to replace the drives with SSDs especially with comparable storage sizes. That would be very expensive.

 

[jman995x]

Yeah, I just don't get it.

For instance:

• Say I'm writing a Word document (and the Word application resides on my Mac HDD).
• Say I start the document, then immediately save it to my Mac HDD with the name I want, then continue writing.
• I've been writing for awhile and haven't saved my document in some time.
• Say the External HDDs have spooled down and gone to sleep while I was writing.
• Now, not wanting to lose what I've added to my Word doc, I'll click on the Save/Save As button.
• Since the Word Application is on my Mac's HDD, AND the Word Document itself is saved on the Mac HDD, you'd think that it'd do a quick "Save" and just keep on going.
• NOPE...all of my External HDD's spool up JUST IN CASE I might want to save the document there.

Wouldn't it be smarter for the computer to show the mounted HDDs and then only spool ONE up when you clicked on it (if, indeed, you wanted to save the document to THAT External HDD?).

I mean, what is the purpose of waking / spooling up all of my External HDDs when there's NO indication, from me, or otherwise, that I'm even interested in saving my document there?

Imagine you had a huge house with a 10 car garage.
Now, imagine that you return home in one of your cars, and when you hit the Garage Door Remote ALL 10 Garage Doors open, even though you just want the one you you last used (where the car you're driving came from, and needs to be returned to).
Wouldn't you think, "Well, that's wasteful, stupid and irritating."?

Aside from chscag's comment above, can anybody give me a good reason why Apple/Mac does this, instead of waiting until you select "A" (singular) destination drive in order to wake/spool it up?

I can't think of a good reason, but maybe I'm missing something.

 

[IWT]

I'm not saying this is the final answer; but when I get a new EHD (Spinner or SSD), the first thing I do is open Disk Utility (DU) and completely erase anything that came with that EHD. Then I format it appropriately and connect it to my iMac.

The EHDs remain dormant until I need them. Did you do that or did you use the EHDs out of the box?

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

Wouldn't it be smarter for the computer to show the mounted HDDs and then only spool ONE up when you clicked on it (if, indeed, you wanted to save the document to THAT External HDD?).

But "mounted" and "available" are two different things. When you say you want to save to a location other than where you got the file, the OS queries all connected devices to ask if they are available. The sleeping drives have to wake up and respond to the query, or they are taken out of the options for saving the document. As chscag said, the spinning up is a drive function, not the OS. All the OS asks is "are you there and ready" and the drive mechanism does the spinning up in response. So the "fault," if there is any, is with the drive makers. That's why I don't buy drives that sleep, if I know about it in advance. It's also why I use Amphetamine to tickle the drives to keep them spinning so that the OS doesn't have that pause while the spinners lumber into action.

Imagine you had a huge house with a 10 car garage.
Now, imagine that you return home in one of your cars, and when you hit the Garage Door Remote ALL 10 Garage Doors open, even though you just want the one you you last used (where the car you're driving came from, and needs to be returned to).
Wouldn't you think, "Well, that's wasteful, stupid and irritating."?

Only until the day I wanted to move the car from one bay to another. The hassle would be phenomenal as I'd have to find the remote for the bay I wanted in the last car to use that bay. (And your analogy is seriously flawed in that the Remote only asked the door openers if they were there, not to open. The question causes them all to open, a fault of the door opener, not the remote or house.)

 

[jpdemers]

Similar problem here, Mac Mini running Big Sur, with an attached Raidon RAID box. For no good reason (e.g., when clicking on a url in an email message), the OS would to wake the drives, and I had to sit there with a spinning beach ball for a good 10-15 seconds while four HDDs spin up, one by one. EXTREMELY aggravating.

SO . . . I installed a little app called Keep Drive Spinning (Keep Drive Spinning - Jon Stovell’s Software) which works by creating and constantly updating a tiny file on whatever disk(s) you designate. (Probably saves the current system time, or something along those lines.) Now the drives don't spin down, so I don't have to wait for them. Not too energy-efficient, but HDDs don't draw all that much power, so no guilt over this. They're enterprise-grade drives, meant to run 24/7, so I don't worry about wear and tear either.

 

[MacInWin]

They're enterprise-grade drives, meant to run 24/7, so I don't worry about wear and tear either.

To be honest, the biggest wear and tear to the drive is shutdown and startup. So keeping them running may be a GOOD thing for them.