Backup Drives

New iMac 27 owner. Using a Fantom Greendrive with two partitions, one for TM and one for CCC. So far so good. Plan on backing up the most recent CCC clone to a portable HD every now and then. Does everyone just leave their external drive on 24/7 for TM? When people are talking about a 2 to 3 year life span for external drives, are they talking about leaving them on all the time? Additionally with this drive I can't have the iMac go to sleep (at least the computer; I have the display set to sleep).

When I do the external drive ejects...which I have assumed is the usual. I have the preferences set not to put drives to sleep, but when I allow the computer to sleep it disconnects the drive (I get a message saying the drive was disconnected without ejecting). Solved the problem by not letting the computer sleep. Is this not the case with all external drives?

I'll try and find the thread. I just tested it and immediately after putting it to sleep the drive disconnects without ejecting.

gnasher729 said:

Strange. That shouldn't happen. What should happen is that sometimes the Mac goes to sleep, external hard drives can power off if they are not used in a while, but when the Mac wakes up or the hard drive is needed, everything should just work fine.

There's another thread where someone has similar problems, worse because he or she is using the external drive as a start drive. This likely depends on the brand of hard drive that you are using.

Click to expand...

Actually, this apparently is a wide-spread problem that affects many different makes of drives. It also apparently is happening after upgrading to Mountain Lion with the same hardware that was working fine before upgrading. I wouldn't know; this is my first Mac, but it seems like this is a common problem that should be fixed.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4174723?start=0&tstart=0