Wake up at regular interval at night. Normal behaviour?

[imofean]

I have a M1 mac mini, Ventura 13.1
I already have "Wake up for network access" unchecked in Energy Saver, but it still keeps waking up at night. It's not really "wake up" because the monitor doesn't turn on. I think it sorting something out in the background?


I'm worried this behaviour will hurt the life span of the mini, as well as the External SSD that attached to it ( attached 24/7. The enclosure is a little bit warm in the morning so it's definitely in use during the night ) Should I eject the External SSD every night? But it'll be such a hassle because I use it almost every morning.

 

[gilby101]

I would run it 24x7. Just set to turn the monitor off after 5 minutes or so. Your SSDs will be fine unless you have some apps running the disks hard.

 

[russell_314]

Yes they wake up and do whatever maintenance or indexing needed. There's a lot going behind the scenes that people don't normally see or look for. If you're worried about power consumption you could turn it off at night but it's going to run slower when you're using it because it's going to be doing those tasks while you're trying to do stuff with it. I wouldn't worry about it wearing out.