External HDD APFS responds sluggishly

[BlackDice]

Hi,
I have a WD Elements external hard drive on my MacBook Air M2 to swap out a large amount of data. I formatted the disk in APFS. Unfortunately, I noticed that the hard disk starts up and goes back to sleep mode at relatively short intervals without access. I've also noticed that when I'm browsing folders on the hard drive to look for something, the hard drive simply goes into sleep mode, so it can sometimes take a few seconds for the contents of a folder to load. That's pretty annoying. Is it due to the APFS mode or the most likely fixed time in the system when the hard drive goes to sleep?

In the settings, "Put hard drives to sleep when possible" is set to never.

 

[gradi]

You might try installing the WD Drive Utility. It allows you to set the sleep time on WD external drives. That may possibly fix your problem.

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[BlackDice]

hmm no this won't help

 

[mi7chy]

Try the drive alive feature in Amphetamine. Is the drive powered via wall plug or from USB port?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12

 

[gradi]

hmm no this won't help

You might want to post on the WD forum to see if anyone there can help.

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[Basic75]

It's definitely not the choice of file system, usually it's the external drive enclosure that puts the drives to sleep. Going on the WD forums is a good idea.

Now if all else fails you can use a shell one-liner in Terminal to perform a write access every couple of seconds, find out which number works in practice:

while true; do sleep 29; touch /Volumes/name_of_external_drive/.dummy; done

That should prevent the drive from going to sleep, though I wouldn't recommend using it for weeks or months at a time (unless it's a server-grade hard drive).

 

[BlackDice]

thanks i will try that

 

[BlackDice]

Try the drive alive feature in Amphetamine. Is the drive powered via wall plug or from USB port?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12

USB C Port to a USB Hub to USB A

 

[Fishrrman]

APFS does not work well with platter-based hard drives.
Excessive fragmentation can occur, along with noisy "disk thrashing".

Reformat the drive to HFS+ and try again.
"Mac OS extended, journaling enabled, GUID partition format"

And get rid of any proprietary WD software that may already be installed on the drive.
Sometimes this exists in its own (invisible) partition, and you may need the WD utilities to remove it.

 

[BlackDice]

Reformat the drive to HFS+ and try again.
"Mac OS extended, journaling enabled, GUID partition format"

this works well. thank you