Thunderbays spin up/down behavior - too frequent, long delay in loading data into finder

Installed Amphetamine + Helper App now - much more advanced than Caffein. What setting do you recommend for waking the drive? Default is 10 Sec. which seems pretty short. 

@nightjar 

Experiment. I have not done more than rudimentary testing with this, so try and report back!

Played around. Amphetamine also not working. I have "Drive Alive" enabled, the OWC keeps spinning down if not used not even a minute after being woken up (by using it) or randomly woken up (whatever the cause for that is). I don't know where to go from here. I know, you say its apple. But since it's your product, a official workaround would be great, since I don't seem to be the only one with this problem on two OWC enclosures with Softraid. 

Is there any worth sharing log files?

@nightjar 

You will find that even if you set up Apple RAID, the behavior will be the same. You can try a clean install. (a second system, we can help you get that going)

I have created this kind of issue in the office and we reported it to Apple. (We used Apple's RAID to do this) It has not been worked on yet, as far as we know. In the test scenario we set up, we just put disks onto a Apple RAID stripe and slept a laptop. the drives spun up and down constantly. this was on Monterey.

The SoftRAID driver does not initiate any activity. It tells macOS where to write data. MacOS is 100% in control of sleep, etc.

I wish I had more information for you. the off part, is this does not seem to happen as frequently with the non RAID standard Mac driver, mainly the drivers like Apple RAID, or SoftRAID.

Thanks for your answer. After some trying: Amphetamine finally seems to work together with the the Enhancer App (not sure why it didn't work before - maybe a clean start with the regular app would have been sufficient, anyways the enhancer doesn't hurt): https://github.com/x74353/Amphetamine-Enhancer

Even though this is not a preferred option energy wise, it's better than the drives spinning up and down every other minute. 

Hopefully Ventura resolves this, I doubt it though. 

Anyone else had any luck with macOS Monterey preventing drives from spinning up and down several hundred times a day? I'm sure I'm on the verge of losing multiple disks from this, and I'm not happy about it. :( 

@williamg 

I do not know of a fix.

Ventura might fix this. (talk about motivating users to upgrade if this is the case)

@softraid-support Is that based on any knowledge or just a guess? :)

@williamg 

There was an attempt to fix this, it appears. I don't know how effective, user feedback will determine that.

BTW: Users have discovered that Ventura makes it very difficult to manage sleep.

@softraid-support Interesting. All I've wanted since Monterey came out (this was working fine on Big Sur) was my arrays to go to sleep when not in use, and wake up when called upon. I know SoftRAID pings the drives every 24 hours (no issue with this) - which wakes them up, but this constant wear and tear throughout the day has been going on far too long. 

I wonder if I should upgrade to the Ventura public beta now or if I'm asking for trouble!

@williamg 

If you want to try it, please do but do not update your existing OS

Create a new volume, insrtall Monterey into it, then install Ventura. Then you have a "go back" if you need it.

Run Disk Utility

Select your disk

Click + volume

Create the new volume.

Boot up into recovery mode, command r, and reinstall macOS (its a lot faster over ethernet than wireless)

I would nor import data, you can do that later.

See how sleep behaves. then update to Ventura, See how sleep behaves.

@softraid-support Thanks for that. I thought about it, but Ventura will be out soon enough anyway, and hopefully we'll have more data at that point. Certainly can't be worse than the junk Apple has left us with with Monterey, right?

Posted by: @williamg

@softraid-support Thanks for that. I thought about it, but Ventura will be out soon enough anyway, and hopefully we'll have more data at that point. Certainly can't be worse than the junk Apple has left us with with Monterey, right?

I wouldn't be so sure. I had a user test Ventura sleep. Drives keep waking up when you put the System to sleep. (All Apple RAID and SoftRAID volumes tested).

Lets see what the worlds user base says in a couple weeks. I have seen lots of complaints about system preferences, it is completely rearranged and doesn't seem to make sense to most people.

@softraid-support Ventura System Settings is such a mess. Everything takes searching, scrolling, and more clicks. I never realized how good System Preferences was until I tried to use System Settings.

@softraid-support I don't put my system to sleep. It's a server, on 24/7. I'm just tired of the drives spinning up and spinning down the whole time while the system is ON 24/7. Is this particular issue fixed in Ventura?