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

@williamg 

A clean install where you do not migrate data should only take up about 30GB.

I am having the same problem. I have 4 Apple volumes in a Thunderbay. I'm on iMac (late 2014) Intel Core i7, 32 GB 1600MHz DDR3 running Big Sur 11.7. I just turned off Spotlight and unchecked "Put hard disks to sleep when possible". Seems to be running a lot faster. It was lagging terribly, especially when using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign it could take up to 60 seconds to respond to anything. Drive spinning has virtually stopped.

@stevewilldesign 

BTW: The slow finder response opening folders, files, etc, is typical of volume directory issues. generally (since we no longer have Disk Warrior for rebuilding directories unless it is updated for Monterey/Ventura), backup restore when you get this.

Has there been any news on this topic? I bought a thunderbay 4, and when connected to my macbookpro (m3) during sleep, the disks keep spinning up and down every few minutes.
Although the problem is probably MacOS, I'm considering returning the whole thing as it's super annoying (and brings unnecessary wear to the disks).

@syberyan 

This is a well known MacOS bug. You can even "zero" the disks, so no partition maps, no volumes and this will happen. Initialize them as Apple drives, no difference. We reported this long ago.

I don't know when Apple will fix it. You notice it more with multidrive enclosures, as it is louder. Fortunately, statistically, there is no evidence this causes drives to wear out faster (Google/Backblaze data), but it is indeed annoying. You can unplug your drives at night as one workaround.

Are there any work arounds or fixes to this issue yet?  My mac studio puts the OWC flex 8 drives to sleep every minute or so.  I unchecked the put drives to sleep button. 

Only thing I've found that works is restarting the computer which is very 1999... 

I read somewhere that this is not a OS or software issue but issue with the drives firmware not allowing constant use. Is that the case? 

@snakes No, this is the macOS, part of the overall sleep/hibernate implementation. 
Best option is disabling sleep. You can disable "put drives to sleep" in macOS, or use terminal: sudo pmset -a disksleep 0

There are third party apps also like Caffeine and Amphetamine, both are free.