Your external hard drive keeps spinning down every few minutes — then stalls your Mac when it wakes. SpinSteady stops it, and shows you it's working. Without keeping your Mac awake.
You unchecked "Put hard disks to sleep." You tried the Terminal commands. The drive still spins down. Here's the part Apple leaves out:
Other tools keep your whole computer awake. SpinSteady keeps the drive awake — close the lid, let the Mac sleep, your drives stay ready.
SpinSteady watches every keep-alive and catches a stubborn drive that slips through and sleeps anyway — then offers a one-tap fix. Nothing else does this.
A read-only keep-alive adds zero write wear and works even on read-only volumes like Time Machine. One tap switches to write mode for the rare enclosure that needs it.
No networking code at all. Nothing about you or your drives ever leaves your Mac. Nothing to collect, nothing to leak.
Pick any external drive from the menu bar. SpinSteady keeps one tiny hidden file on it — nothing else is touched.
A gentle touch on a timer keeps the drive's idle timer from ever firing. Survives reboots, unplugs, renames, and sleep/wake.
A green status per drive, live check timing, and a heads-up if a drive ever sleeps anyway — with a one-tap fix.
No subscription. Ever.
Because most external enclosures ignore that setting. They run their own idle timer in the drive or the USB/Thunderbolt bridge firmware, and macOS has no supported way to change it. SpinSteady works around it by keeping the drive gently busy so its timer never reaches zero.
No — and that's the point. SpinSteady keeps only the drives you choose awake. Your display sleeps, your Mac sleeps, your battery is unaffected.
It's a single small folder holding one tiny keep-alive file — the thing SpinSteady touches on a timer. That's the entire footprint. Remove the drive from SpinSteady and you can delete it.
By default SpinSteady uses a read-only keep-alive, which adds no write wear at all. Continuous gentle spinning is generally easier on a consumer drive than the repeated spin-up/spin-down cycles you're getting now. A write mode is available for the few enclosures that only respond to writes.
No. SpinSteady contains no networking code. Nothing is collected, nothing is transmitted, there are no analytics.
The unlock is a one-time App Store purchase, so refunds are handled by Apple through reportaproblem.apple.com.