Put hard disks to sleep when possible

[jdb8167]

M1 Macbook Air here. Still see the setting. Don't have any external drives.

View attachment 1733186

That's pretty strange. It seems to linger for a while after an external drive is ejected. When was the last time you plugged in an external?

Here is my MBA btw:

 

[senttoschool]

That's pretty strange. It seems to linger for a while after an external drive is ejected. When was the last time you plugged in an external?

Here is my MBA btw:
View attachment 1733342
View attachment 1733343

I never plugged in an external hard drive.

 

[ArPe]

Would this feature be available if you were using a external hard drive connected to an M1?

External spinners go to sleep after about 5 mins of idle time on all operating systems.

 

[k-hawinkler]

On my M1 Mac mini I no longer check ”Put hard disks to sleep when possible”. It takes too darn long to wake up 18TB Seagate IronWolf drives in an OWC TB3 RAID enclosure, connected via an OWC TB3 Dock.​

 

[jdb8167]

I never plugged in an external hard drive.

Interesting mystery then on when MacOS decides to enable those preference items. I have no idea why and when they appear. I've seen them but then they disappear.

 

[WebHead]

That would depend on the drive. If the drive gets power through the Mac (bus-powered), then the drive should always power down when the Mac is sleeping. But, if the drive is self-powered (with its own power supply), then it depends on the drive's firmware. Some self-powered drives do not ever spin down, unless actually unplugged from power.

Thanks!

And on a related note, can external drives spin down independently of the macOS setting? Does their firmware override any Mac sleep settings?

 

[DeltaMac]

Yes.
I have a W-D external that runs when it needs to. The system settings don't have any control over that drive.
If I want to control it, I unplug that drive when I don't need it. It can't do anything then 😀
(Third-party manufacturers apparently do not care to provide support for every possible combination of power settings...)

 

[fbr$]

I was getting a "failed" error message about 5 to 15 minutes after beginning the Complete Drive Test on the app WD Drive Utilities for macOS Monterey on my MBA M1 to test my external WD My Book Duo hard drive.

Then I turned off the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" option on the Battery settings on System Preferences, the issue has been completely resolved.

 

[WebHead]

Just recently my WD MyBook Duo started spinning up and down constantly, rather than just several times a day. It could have been related to the system restore Apple carried out when replacing a faulty internal HD, or upgrading to 12.3.1.

So for the first time ever I downloaded the WD Drive Utilities app and disabled the built-in sleep setting. Hoping things stabilise with only the OS controlling sleep.

Update: The MyBook stopped spinning up and down constantly, but was still spinning up for around 10 minutes at half-hourly intervals. So I've deselected "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" and will just let it sleep when the Mac sleeps (hopefully).