I have an external drive (3.5" hdd, SATA) in an enclosure (usb 3) (purchased separately), connected to a thunderbolt dock (OWC) connected alternately to an iMac and a macbook pro. The HDD goes to sleep, and causes problems. Freezes, weird internet access problems, kernel panics.

I have done some research, and can't seem to figure out:

how to know whether it is the drive, enclosure, or computer causing the sleep, although, fiddling with various settings on the mac seemed to have no effect, although it may have increased my battery usage :(

how to adjust settings on the drive, or in the enclosure.

How to determine what the sleep behavior of prospective drives will be.

As a workaround, I tried to write a zsh script to touch the drive ever few seconds. This kinda worked, but was a struggle to figure out appropriate permissions issues and how to make it run automatically.

I welcome all guidance, pointers to resources, clarifications, incantations, well-wishes.

Long story short--I don't want to connect my mac to my iCloud account, but every time I login to my laptop, I get three popups in a row that say "This Mac Can't connect to iCloud because of a problem with [my email] ...".

I can't find a setting that allows me to disable this, and online searches have been fruitless.

Hi, I have a weird cubic space in my garage wall due to the location of the chimney and stairs to the basement.
The lower edge of that cubic hole is at 41 inches (104 cm) from the floor. Its deep is 40 inches (101 cm). Width 39 inches (99 cm). Height 46 inches (117 cm).
Too deep for static shelves, I cannot reach the end. Too tall for sliding shelves (kind of drawer thing), I am 5'7'' (172 cm). In its current form, it is too much of a space for its practical use.
I thought that a carousel that moves shelves up and down (like in this design for shoes https://storagemotion.com/shoeselect/) but for heavier weights would be practical... I have no idea how to even name the parts to buy them, if they exist.
Also, I will appreciate suggestions for an alternative solution.
Thanks.
PS: located in Massachusetts, US.

Recently, I've been thinking pretty hard about how to archive data. Optical media is out, due to my (possibly irrational?) fear of disc rot. HDDs just break with extended use, SSDs have been known to die with either overuse or just existing for an extended period of time. What's left?

I have heard of tape (of some kind) being used for backup in some bigger operations, but with my experieces with VHS, and to a lesser extent, cassettes, they seem to be very susceptible to mould.

Any suggestions?

I'm talking about this 2 TB LaCie Portable SSD and this Samsung T7 2 TB SSD. They both have the same ~1 GB/s read-write speed, the same 3-year limited warranty, and the same USB 3.2 Gen2 connector. But the LaCie drive is $369, while the Samsung drive is $130.
Am I missing something? Or is it just luxury tax?

I'm looking for mountable remote storage that I can use for my backup solution at home. I'm trying to get set up with backuppc and need to be able to mount a large remote filesystem to store my archives. I've tried renting a 1TB storage box from Hetzner, but my account was rejected (I assume because of a recent legal name change). Can anybody recommend a similar provider of remote storage that I can rent and mount onto my server?

I've got a 2TB Toshiba drive (formatted as NTFS) that has become very slow and I was wondering if anyone here as any ideas what the problem could be and how I could fix it. All the data I'd need off the drive is backed up, but I would at least like a drive to put it back on to!

In short, it became slow after I had to force power-off the system it was connected to (Pop OS installed on another external drive which I unplugged by mistake) and I haven't bothered to try to fix it in the six months since.

I've tested it on Pop and it takes about 10-20 minutes to mount, and 2 minutes to unmount and safely remove. The data itself seems fine but performance is slow, accessing a 20MB image takes several seconds and selecting the drive in GNOME Disks caused it to freeze.

The drive sounded louder than normal, especially after plugging in.

On Windows, the drive was recognised and browsable immediately, but browsing through folders was very slow - opening some folders causes Windows Explorer to freeze for a while. Some of my double-clicks were mis-recognised as click-to-rename, which took several seconds to activate and during which time Task Manager reported the average response time between 5000 and 11000 ms.

Attempting to load an audio file resulted in lots of buffering. Task Manager reports an active time of 100% (even when not loading files or folders) and the activity never exceeded 100 KB/s (and doesn't sustain it for more than a second). Ejecting the drive takes forever - after ejecting it using the tray icon, the tray icon is not removed (even though there are no other drives connected or listed) and the active time is still 100% with the indicator LED blinking non-stop. The system did not enter sleep right away after me asking it to either.

All of that to say, does anyone know what the issue could be, or how I could find and fix it? Thanks!

Edit: fixed and normal functionality restored (at least so I can check the drive a bit easier) using Scan & Repair in Windows (see my comment).