WD 4TB My Book sleeps and wakes constantly!

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I purchased a new My Book for my M1 Mac mini running Mac OS 11.2 and the drive sleeps and wakes constantly! I’ve partitioned it into two partitions, one I use for Time Machine, the other is general storage. I’ve unchecked “put hard disks to sleep when possible” and disabled spotlight on the non-Time Machine partition. I’ve also downloaded the WD drive utilities and disabled the sleep timer. I understand that Time Machine will perform hourly backups, but that is not the problem I am having.

I will be setting here, and the drive will spin up, then down, then up, then down. Sometimes I can hear the drive being accessed, other times no. I will check if Time Machine is doing a backup or clean-up and it is not during these instances.

I’m about ready to format the drive, return it, and buy a non-WD external drive. I’ve had a My Book on my old MBP that I replaced that did not behave this way, and I might just swap to that one, but I didn’t want to wipe the Time Machine yet because it’s my old system’s backups.

Does anyone else have these problems? Do you have a solution?

2

Big Sur and M1 mac’s are a moving target right now-I just loaded Beta7 last week.

I would hold off on any WD changes.

I also start a NEW TM backup disk each year - TM backups I use for data but CCC for full and system backups.

I have lots of WD nas and Mybook devices BUT I shutdown my stack of Mac mini system when I log out.

Things to try on a M 1 mac:
1 try a Thunderbolt to USB3 adapter or short adapter cable
2 test with NO bluetooth devices

I beginning to think spotlight NEVER sleeps but you could check the system log files.
(With out a log file reader the log files have become a use full in problem solving as a paper dog chase an asbestos cat through hell)