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.

 

[Brian33]

The only thing I can think of is to Eject them. Then you'd have the inconvenience of remounting them if or when you needed them. It does seem odd that macOS would spin up other drives when you're just accessing the internal storage.

 

[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."?

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.

 

[Brian33]

I don't think the behavior you're describing is purposeful. I totally agree that is seems unnecessary and annoying!

I strongly suspect that different peoples' setups give different behaviors, though. I don't think my externals act that way, and I've 3 external HDDs always connected, and often more. (I'll try to verify later when I get back to that machine.)

My guess is that it depends upon the type of interface, the specifics of the enclosure controller, and the specifics of the drives themselves. I know that different HDDs have different sleep behaviors, and perhaps it isn't always controllable from the OS.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Any time you activate an Open or Save dialog, macOS reads (i.e., loads) the directories of every drive. That way, besides some possible delays in updating previews,
which don’t prevent user interaction, there is no lag while navigating any of them.

I will mention that I have seen other instances trigger multiple drive reads. For example, TechTool Pro checks the SMART status on all drives whenever I connect a drive.

 

[o_0]

sorry answered the opposite question. (how to prevent external drive from going to sleep)
could not find delete reply.

Original reply.
I had the same issue, in my case the external drive went to sleep faster then the video buffer when watching movies.
solution I found that works was the following settings

the weird part was that I needed to also drag the “turn display off after” to never.
only unchecking “put hard disk to sleep when possible” did not work. ( it might be enough in your case)