Yeah, the Setachi and Quiizlab version have had a lot of positive feedback among the Youtuberati.

The only times I've ever had that issue was when the drive was crapping out or the connection was dodgy.

Disk Utility is a prudent precaution and you should do it from recovery mode (hold the power button down when starting up). (Sidenote: it is entirely safe to reinstall the OS from there as well). If it is an HFS+ drive you could also use Disk Warrior, but alas they have been able to update that brilliant app for APFS.

You do have your Admin user account on the internal drive, don't you?

It is a shame the dock is not thunderbolt, but after spending £1,300 on a computer, I did not want to spend a lot more.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

Yeah, the Setachi and Quiizlab version have had a lot of positive feedback among the Youtuberati.

The only times I've ever had that issue was when the drive was crapping out or the connection was dodgy.

Disk Utility is a prudent precaution and you should do it from recovery mode (hold the power button down when starting up). (Sidenote: it is entirely safe to reinstall the OS from there as well). If it is an HFS+ drive you could also use Disk Warrior, but alas they have been able to update that brilliant app for APFS.

Mine is a Hagibis, which looks identical to the Quiizlab one in every way, but was cheaper. I did also look at the Setachi, I like the indent idea so the mac sits in it, but it it is NvME only, i wanted to use a SSD drive I already had, the Hagibis can accept both. The drive is APFS, since it is not going to be used with any other machine.
i used the following commend to change the drive sleep time, sudo pmset -a disksleep 1410065408.
So far it seems to have done the job, i left the machine alone for about an hour or so this morning as I was helping my brother sort out the wheels on his trailer and I can still access the drive. It is a SSD, so don't really need to sleep,

Thanks for the info, I know about the recovery mode, the way to get to it is different from older Macs, can also use Time machine from there as well.

You do have your Admin user account on the internal drive, don't you?

Yes, I have put it all back as it was as the computer got confused when coming out of sleep

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

what I have done is moved the user directory onto it, hoping that because the mac uses it a lot, it will keep it alive. It is not slowing down the computer at all, so we will see.

Don't do that.

That would have been a reasonably sensible thing to do on a traditional Unixy OS, on a fixed internal drive. It isn't a good idea on modern macOS, especially with an external drive.

While the underpinnings of macOS are still very Unixy, it has moved further and further from its Unix roots over the years. Things that were sensible to do in the past with filesystems are not necessarily sensible now.

Conveniently Howard over at The Eclectic Light Company (well worth adding to your RSS reader if you want to know about how Macs work) wrote about this today.

https://eclecticlight.co/2023/04/26/freeing-space-on...

In the past, one powerful solution has been to relocate your entire Home folder to external storage. This used to be done by copying the whole Home folder to the external disk, then changing Advanced Options for that user in the Users & Groups preference pane, but that’s an option no longer available in System Settings.

This has become increasingly precarious since Catalina brought the Boot Volume Group, and growing expectations that your Home folder would be found on the Data volume. Unless you really know what you’re doing, can spend the time getting it right, and have plenty of backups, I wouldn’t recommend that you try this, at least not in Ventura.

Also, get a copy if Daisy Disk if you haven't already

https://daisydiskapp.com

Edited by andynormancx (Wed 26-Apr-23 09:38:14)

One feature I find useful is Disk Images - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/d...

You don't really have to worry too much about the file system used on the device as long as the Mac can write to it.

I use one for iMovie so 1Tb of DV footage can be edited without using up my limited onboard storage.

In reply to a post by smouty:

One feature I find useful is Disk Images - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/d...

You don't really have to worry too much about the file system used on the device as long as the Mac can write to it.

I use one for iMovie so 1Tb of DV footage can be edited without using up my limited onboard storage.

cheers for that, Mac can't write to NTFS, without some fiddling,

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

cheers for that, Mac can't write to NTFS, without some fiddling,

It can if on an SMB share

In reply to a post by smouty:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

cheers for that, Mac can't write to NTFS, without some fiddling,

It can if on an SMB share

Yersah, i realise it can do that as I have an external hard drive on my Nas for back up and that can be read by the Mac