Spin down of HDDs

try setting system to never sleep.

or a third party utility like caffeine or amphetamine

SoftRAID does not control sleep at all.

I have an M1 Max studio with 32G ram. I recently had a "bad" Sequoia startup (version 15.1.1) where my bluetooth keyboard didn't connect and despite rebooting again I started getting constant spin downs of 7 disks in two Thunderbay 4 enclosures even though I had energy saver settings set to no disk sleep. Also, Softraid gave me an error of missing disk when the spindowns happened and took a long time to load my external drives.

The following solved the problem for me. I turned off spotlight indexing on all disks and deleted the following system files: com.apple.powermanagement.plist and com.apple.autowake.plist files. Rebooted. Set disk sleep to on and then to off in energy saver settings and rebooted again. The problem has not recurred. 

@denverite 

Interesting. Did you re-enable spotlight?
I am passing this through engineering, if they have any comments, I will post it. either way, we will bring it up using Apple feedback assistant, but whether they respond or not to this issue is out of our control.

But I will save this and see if it helps anyone else who complains going forward.

Yes I restarted spotlight. Somehow the faulty startup wrote something to one of the plist files or somewhere else in the system that made it impossible to re-enable no spindown and the plist files were rebuilt on the reboot after I deleted them. Bluetooth keyboard doesn't load properly on my morning reboot sporadically (maybe 3-4 times a year), but this is the only time the spindown problem happened afterwards. If this hadn't worked I was going to try the terminal command to disable disk sleep -- sudo pmset -a disksleep 0. I'm glad I didn't need to since I am a complete rookie on terminal.

@softraid-support , thanks for the hint, I will give it a try and report back here in the forum. For the time being I keep my iMac on my desk using it as a gateway to the OWC Raid.

@pesch 

Something a user reported. Try this:

Turn off spotlight indexing on all disks and delete the following system files: com.apple.powermanagement.plist and com.apple.autowake.plist files. Reboot. Set disk sleep to on and then to off in energy saver settings and reboot again. The problem has not recurred.

So glad I stumbled upon this forum. I've noticed a different but similar problem going back at least to OS Ventura and SoftRaid 7.x, where clicking on the trash icon would cause a Finder freeze (beachball-not responding) for the duration of time it took for each drive in a Thunderbay 6 (4 drives in a RAID5 array, two single volumes) to spin up. If I just issued a command to empty the trash, it would do so. I will certainly give this fix a try and report back the results. Thanks so much! -SS-

I couldn't follow the instructions above exactly as I was not "allowed" to delete the indicated files. I made all the settings changes, and rebooted the computer as 'root', deleted the files, and followed the rest of the directions. It did not solve the problem. The last artillery I can think to fire at this is to disable SIP after making the settings changes, delete the files, and reboot. If I remember correctly, SIP should reset itself at the reboot, but I'll check to make sure it's enabled. Watch this space (Burma Shave) -SS-

@sschifrin 

No need to disable SIP, I recommend against it now. (it was required for earlier versions of MacOS X to install drivers)

If I understand you, your drives are still randomly spinning down?

@softraid-support 

Yes, that's correct, or that's my assumption. As an example, there is one solid blue pilot light on Slot 1 at the moment, that slot houses an 8TB empty spare. I have some items in the trash now, and if I try to inspect the trash before emptying it, the remaing 5 pilot lights will flash green individually before the trash will open. If I issue Command-Delete from the keyboard, the trash will immediately empty. None of the items in the trash were stored on any of the drives in the Thunderbay.

And I appreciate the wave-off on SIP, thank you!

-SS-

@sschifrin 

This trash behavior is MacOS. the drives spinning down is also and a result of how HDD's take time to spin up.

"energy star" is what requires everything to go into low power mode, but it has bugs in macOS. If you already tried all the sleep settings to never, then get a third party app like Caffeine or Amphetamine to keep the drives awake.

Caffeine! I'm positive there's a copy of that hiding here somewhere -- I used to use it to keep my monitor from dimming during calibration runs using older versions of Spyder... Thanks!

Caffeine did nothing for me.  I solved the problem by creating an AppleScript program that simply touches a file on the ThunderBay every 30 seconds.  Have never had a problem since.  Perhaps not the best solution but it works and doesn't really eat up any CPU time.

repeat

do shell script "/usr/bin/touch /Volumes/ThunderBay/name_of_file_to_touch"

delay 20

end repeat

@henryn2md 

Actually very elegant!

Its a shame this has to be done, but it works. I will pass it on to others if need be.

thanks