Spinning beach ball on every file save or download in brand new M4 Mac Mini

FMD wrote:

I think Barney-15E hit on my issue:

First I disabled "Put Hard Disks To Sleep When Possible" in Settings/Energy. No change

I changed Time Machine to backup Daily (vs hourly) - no change

I have 2 fairly large designed for MAC Western Digital Drives (4TB & 8TB) that connect via USB to my CalDigit Pro4S. They are formatted MAC OS Ext (Journaled) and APFS respectively. I think there have been reports of issues with WD drives.

I disconnected the first one - No change

I disconnected the last one - Issue stopped completely

Use System Information > USB to see what speed the drive is getting. 480Mbps is USB2 speed. I have had hubs revert everything attached to USB2 if there was a USB2 device attached (in my case it was a CD/DVD r/w).

Part 1 of 2

Restart in Safe Mode. This will perform a Disk Repair, clear cache files and only load Apple Software, extensions and fonts. The boot up will be slow and can take some time - Normal.

Safe Mode will also eliminate Third Party Software, extensions and drivers from loading. It will only load the Minimum amount of Core Apple Processes to allow the the computer to function at a reduced Level of Performance 

Does the issue present in this mode ?

Sometimes a Safe Boot followed by a Normal Boot will just put things right.

If not - there could be something in the main User Account playing up. To further isolate this - Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac. Then log out of the Main User account and log into the dummy account and test again if the issue persists.

If the issue is present in the dummy account - then, this appears to be a System Wide issue on the computer.

Part 2 of 2

To Drill Down further and to avoid a session of Q&A, Q&A  and Q&A  

Download the Application Etrecheck  ( External Link ) directly from the Developer.

The Application is Not a " Silver Bullet "  and is  only a tool to examine the Hardware / Software used on this computer 

This is a Diagnostic Tool that makes no changes to the computer Hardware / Software used on this computer 

The application is free or paid from added features. 

The Report will Not Reveal Any Personal Information. 

Post back the Full Report - copy and paste - >>>> using the Additional Text Icon ( 3rd Icon to last ) <<<<

Do you have an external drive attached which you allow to sleep? When you open or save, macOS polls all connected drives. Sometimes, drives end up mounting using USB2, so the time waiting for the drive to spin up and be ready can be painful.

Please do follow Owl-53's solid advice.

To add a little bit: when this happens, it is almost always the case the use migrated everything from a previous mac, and some of the old stuff is causing a problem in the new machine/OS. This is particularly relevant when the move is from a completely different architecture, as in going from an Intel to an Apple Silicon Mac.

If I were to guess - and, why not? - I'd say you probably have an "antivirus" in there...

I am having the same exact issue with Tahoe, every open file or save dialog beachballs as my external disks spin up.

[Edited by Moderator]