I hope someone can help me get to the bottom of an annoying issue.
I’ve got a 2017 iMac on a desk in my bedroom. Connected to it is a 3TB Seagate hard drive that has a few partitions, which is used for Time Machine backups for the iMac and a MacBook, a beta macOS environment, and external storage.
When the iMac is asleep, the hard drive will randomly spin up and down.
This isn’t the normal behaviour you’d expect from Time Machine backups... it will literally spin up and spin down again immediately. And then 30 seconds later it will do it again. And then it might stay quiet for an hour.
And then sometimes it will spin up and start writing data. I assume this is Time Machine so I don’t have a problem with that.
Yet, when I boot from the hard disk, from the beta macOS install on it that I use for testing, it will sleep peacefully and not spin up randomly. So it must be a software issue.
Is there any software I can use to see what is requesting access so often while the iMac is sleeping? Or any logs I can check?
It’s very distracting while trying to sleep. I’m going to have to buy an external SSD at this rate.
(FWIW I can’t just shut down my iMac at night because then the MacBook can’t back up to Time Machine - it’s only connected to power at night. Plus it’s inconvenient to shut it down anyway.)
I’ve got a 2017 iMac on a desk in my bedroom. Connected to it is a 3TB Seagate hard drive that has a few partitions, which is used for Time Machine backups for the iMac and a MacBook, a beta macOS environment, and external storage.
When the iMac is asleep, the hard drive will randomly spin up and down.
This isn’t the normal behaviour you’d expect from Time Machine backups... it will literally spin up and spin down again immediately. And then 30 seconds later it will do it again. And then it might stay quiet for an hour.
And then sometimes it will spin up and start writing data. I assume this is Time Machine so I don’t have a problem with that.
Yet, when I boot from the hard disk, from the beta macOS install on it that I use for testing, it will sleep peacefully and not spin up randomly. So it must be a software issue.
Is there any software I can use to see what is requesting access so often while the iMac is sleeping? Or any logs I can check?
It’s very distracting while trying to sleep. I’m going to have to buy an external SSD at this rate.
(FWIW I can’t just shut down my iMac at night because then the MacBook can’t back up to Time Machine - it’s only connected to power at night. Plus it’s inconvenient to shut it down anyway.)
