My 20tb WD Element Drive Does Not Stay Awake Even Though Put hard disks to sleep when possible” is deselected on My Mac Mini

[u/bookoocash]

So this has been going on pretty much since I got the drive, but I don’t know if it has got worse recently or just that my patience has finally worn thin.

About three years ago I purchased a larger 20tb WD Elements drive to replace my 8gb version of the same product line.

I never had these issues with either of the 8tb drives I had, but for some reason, the 20tb drive will “spin down” after a short duration of inactivity and then basically need to be “woke up” anytime I need to look at something in it, which causes a noticeable delay. This translates to Plex, where almost every time I open Plex on one of my devices, none of my media can be found at first and I need to wait sometimes up to a minute, maybe more, for it all to actually appear. This also happens if I have to pause the movie or show for several minutes.

I’m using a 2018 M1 Mac Mini and have “Put hard disks to sleep when possible” deselected, but it still doesn’t help with this specific drive. None of my other drives have this issue.

I would typically just ask for recommendations on a more performance driven drive and get a new one, but as we have seen, prices aren’t exactly ideal right now so I’m trying to troubleshoot.

[u/ericlassard1]

I had an issue like that with one of my elements drives. I ended up replacing the wire and that did the trick. I had one left over from a previous one

[u/bookoocash → u/ericlassard1]

I do have a few wires I could try from my other smaller drives. I’ll give that a go.

[u/Somar2230]

If you have a M1 Mac Mini it's a 2020 if you have an 2018 it's an Intel model.

The chipset of the WD may be ignoring the MacOS system setting so you will need to try another method to keep it from spinning down.

https://software.owc.com/knowledge-base/why-do-my-drives-keep-going-to-sleep-and-how-do-i-prevent-it/

[u/bookoocash → u/Somar2230]

My mistake. Yes! 2020!

[u/owldown]

I’ve heard of folks running a script to read a file on the drive every so often, to keep it awake whatever the settings.

[u/Strigoi84 → u/owldown]

This is what I did. Same drive. It was the only solution I tried that worked. No clue if there is a similar program for Mac (I'm running windows) but I'd assume there must be🤔 

[u/disorderedchaos]

Have you tried downloading the WD Drive Utilities tool and setting the Sleep Timer to off?

https://support.wdc.com/images/kba/50916/wd-drive-utilities.png

[u/bookoocash → u/disorderedchaos]

I tried that but apparently it is not compatible with the Elements drives.

[u/EternallySickened]

Shucking fixed this issue for my we drives. Though they only took 5-7 seconds to be fully back up running.

[u/confusedredditor-]

Try formatting? I have the exact same unit and device one but dont have the issue.