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Why does my OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini repeatedly and sequentially spin up the drives when mounted and unmounted?
When the drive is mounted on my system, the volumes in the drive keep going to sleep and whenever I need to access the files system, my computer momentarily hangs as it waits for the 4 drives to spin up. This can be very annoying when I'm needing a responsive system for what I'm working on.
But when I've unmounted the drive, it's still connected to my Mac, because it is in the chain of devices with my older Belkin ThunderBolt 1 Hub at the end of the chain because the drive enclosure is faster than the hub; 20 Gb/s vs the hub's 10 Gb/s.
But every once in a while I hear the sequentially spin up the drives in the enclosure. It doesn't hang my system as it does when it is mounted, but the constant spin up when not in use bothers me. The SoftRAID 8.5 application is not running, the driver used is 8.0.
I'm running macOS 14.7.6 on my MacBook Pro M1 Max and it's plugged in to the right side Thunderbolt port via the Apple Thunderbolt 2 adapter.
Why does it do this and how do I stop it from spinning up when it's unmounted? How can I reduce the system pause that happens when it is mounted and I need to use the file system?
Cheers and thanks.
Posted : 22/08/2025 2:08 pm
A long standing Apple issue, caused by the implementation of energy saving by people who never used external drives.
Using Caffeine, Amphetamine, etc to keep the drives spinning is all you can do.
Or set sleep to never, which usually gets around this also, but not always.
Posted : 22/08/2025 3:19 pm
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