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Phat^Trance

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 9, 2009
553
47
Im on mac and i have set the option in big sur that the external wd element drive (14tb) shouldnt go into sleep mode, but still it does after a while.

Is there a way (maybe an app / tweak?) that forces the drive to be running all the time and not go into power saving mode?
 
I suggest you go to WD's site and download their drive utility software:

Maybe that will give you the option to do this.
 
I suggest you go to WD's site and download their drive utility software
Don't! See below.

Is there a way (maybe an app / tweak?) that forces the drive to be running all the time and not go into power saving mode?
My external WD drives park their heads and stop the spinning disk after 7 seconds. This is an energy saving feature but causes delays when you want to use the disk. With my use, the heads were parking and starting again about twice a minute on average.

You may be able to set the head parking time to something other than 7 seconds - this is a setting in the firmware of the drive. This requires some WD utilities (wdidle3) running Windows or a DOS boot disk. I had no success when I tried this. If you attempt this, make sure that you have no important data on the disk. I would avoid this for macOS.

Some have had success with hdapm, but not me - probably because it only works with SATA connected drives, not those via USB.

But two solutions which do work:

1) My solution is to have a background task (a simple python script) which writes to the disk every 7 seconds.

2) You can use Keep Drive Spinning which also writes to the disk frequently. It is AppleScript wrapped as an application. I would use this if I didn't already have my python script.
 
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