How to hibernate an external hard drive

[kukata81]

Hello! Many people try to disable disks from going to sleep, but for me it's the opposite. I want to know if there is a way to set my external hard drive to sleep at night. The problem is that it is quite noisy and even if the "Mac Mini" is asleep, it continues to scrape quite often. It's a 3.5 hard drive that's placed in a hard drive enclosure. Is there any solution for this case?

 

[m..]

I don't know it is possible without ejecting the drive manually before sleeping
But if you find a way it would help me too.

 

[Bigwaff]

Drives and enclosures have firmware. Have you checked whether you need firmware updates? Unfortunately, many vendors release such updaters for Windows platform. YMMV.

 

[kukata81]

I looked now, but I can't find one for my model. Toshiba doesn't seem to have much support. And it's still for Windows.

 

[kukata81]

I'm not good at these commands, but I read somewhere that you can set a time to turn off the hard drive. Will it do anything if I type it like this: sudo pmset -a disksleep 60?

 

[m..]

Did pmset work?
There is an option in setting to "Put hard drives to sleep when possible", check to see if that is on/off.
If they never go to sleep there may be some software running which keeps them awake.
You can see your current settings with pmset -g. And that actually says which processes will stop sleep.
pmset -g log might be useful.

My problem is that the disk goes to sleep when the computer dose but periodically the computer wakes up (with the screen off) to do background tasks like checking for updates, indexing disks, etc and that wakes the drives too.

You could turn this off on Intel Macs but not any more. Unless possibly with pmset (I haven't tried) but actually I would prefer to keep it on but just not wake the HDs.

Anyway it's not too much of an issue for me so if haven't bothered to do anything

 

[kukata81]

"Put hard drives to sleep when possible" - it was on, so I decided to try turning it off. I don't have a problem if something is running in the background, just the external hard drive, because it's the only one making noise. I haven't found any programs for this purpose yet. If its capacity wasn't so large (4TB) I would replace it with an SSD right away. But an SSD with that capacity is quite expensive.

 

[MarkC426]

It’s possibly a manufacturer/compatibility issue.
I have always used LaCie external drives with my cMP and Studio.
These always go to sleep when the Mac does.

 

[Fishrrman]

Try "Semulov" to dismount the drive and [hopefully] to "sleep it", too.

Semulov is small, free. Get it here:

Release v2.6 · kainjow/Semulov

Fix Eject All keyboard shortcut not working Fix menubar button not highlighting correctly in newer macOS versions Experimental support for Apple Silicon Requires macOS 10.10 or greater

github.com

If you are talking about a platter-based "hard drive", I'm thinking that whether a drive spins down (or not) when dismounted (but still connected to power) is a function of the drive's own firmware on its controller. And may have nothing to do with the Mac.

If nothing seems to be working, my suggestions:
Either:
a. DISCONNECT the drive at night (I absoutely positively guarantee that it won't wake up when disconnected)
or
b. Power off the Mac at night (which is what I do myself).

 

[kukata81]

Apparently only turning it off helps in this case. All the settings mentioned do not help. Thanks to everyone who wrote!

 

[Fishrrman]

"Apparently only turning it off helps in this case. All the settings mentioned do not help"

Sometimes you just have to do... what you have to do.