System always access external disks

[Rigido]

Hi,
some weeks ago I replaced the iMac 27" internal disk with an OWC SSD kit.
I had to recover Big Sur from internet and import user data from a Time Machine backup, everything worked and I was happy.
Since then I noticed that if I wake up computer and try some simple operations, like refreshing a Firefox tab or just pressing right mouse button on Desktop (!!!), I have to wait for external disks to exit from standby and spin up, I had some "Wake transition timed out after 180 seconds while calling power state change callbacks" kernel panics too (I found a lot of reports about it).
Sometimes kernel panic happened in front of me, I just woke up computer but I couldn't hear external disks to spin up, about 180 seconds and...boom💥!
External disks are 2 x 1TB 3.5" inserted into a Xiaobi dual bay HDD USB3 docking station, one whole disk is for Time Machine the other one is split into two MacOS journaled partitions mounted on Desktop.

Does someone know why OS tries to access external disk(s) and it waits for them to come online before doing everything else?
If I want to test OS responsiveness can I eject external disks (mainly Time Machine disk) without issues?

Thanks.

 

[trevoz]

I think you'll find a couple of things contribute to the issue:

* Big Sur Spotlight indexes the TM volume which cannot be excluded;
* As soon as you login TM starts checking to make a snapshot and Spotlight starts look for changes.

This is why I ultimately replaced my spinning rust TM volume with an SSD.

 

[Rigido]

Big Sur Spotlight indexes the TM volume which cannot be excluded

Hi Trevoz and thank you,
you gave me a direction and on latest Big Sur beta I can put TM volume on the Privacy tab of Spotlight preferences and, you know what, it seems problem solved:

I'll keep an eye on it but, right now, it looks like problem is really solved.

Ciao.

 

[trevoz]

Glad to hear it (and something to look forward to: being able to exclude TM from Spotlight which can't be done on Big Sur 11.1).