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I have 2 external WD mypassport 2.5" 5TB (the one is a model 2626 and the other is a different model) and for some reason when I put my M1 mac to sleep during the night, every few minutes I'll hear the drives spinning up. I couldn't find what process was causing this, but I realized that even if I unmount the partitions, or eject the actual drives via Disk Utility, they will still power up at night for a few seconds, and this will happen every few minutes as if they are mounted (only that they are not).

I've tried physically disconnecting the one drive or the other, in case one is faulty, yet whichever remains connected will still spin up and I doubt both are faulty. They are connected directly to my mac and I have no other usb devices. My energy settings are set to put hard drives to sleep when possible and via the WD utilities I had set both to spin down after 10mins of inactivity which they respect when the computer is awake. As a matter of fact, the whole random spinning up thing doesn't happen when I use the computer, but only after I put the machine to sleep.

How can I further investigate this issue?

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This is almost certainly Power Nap. Power Nap does what’s called a “dark wake” every few minutes and if there are devices attached, they will be powered up each time. Try disabling it and see if the behavior goes away.

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