Lion + 3TB usb + Time Machine issues

[thederby]

Let me preface this post by saying I'm not sure if this is a Lion/Time Machine issue or a hardware/compatibility issue.

Due to a Seagate drive failure, I recently upgraded the system drive in my 27in iMac to a 2TB drive. This increase in capacity also prompted my decision to move away from my old Time Machine solution (2TB usb drive hanging off my AEBS shared by my MBP and iMac), at least for the iMac.

I decided to use an external drive dock along with a Western Digital WD30EZRX.

I figured the drive dock would allow me some flexibility in working with other media, doing drive recoveries, etc.

So... the drive formats fine, but when Time Machine runs, I get a "Time Machine Cannot Complete Backup" and "Unable to create backup directory" error.

I've done a disk repair (no errors) and reformatted the disk.

Now i'm not sure if this could be an issue with Lion vs SATA bridge chipset (Jmicron JM20330, I believe).

Or if it could be SATA bridge vs WD30EZRX issue...

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

[spidey3]

Is the target disk formatted using HFS+ ?
Are there any related errors in kernel.log or system.log?

Spidey!!!

 

[thederby]

Is the target disk formatted using HFS+ ?

Are there any related errors in kernel.log or system.log?

the more i dig into this, i think the drive/dock may be going to sleep and not waking up (while remaining "mounted")...

i unchecked "put hard disks to sleep when possible" and will see if that fixes it.

 

[thederby]

just to follow up, this was either a chipset vs drive issue or a chipset vs osx lion issue.

my return window was rapidly closing, so i swapped out the jmicron-chipset dock for a lucidport-based one.

two days with the stock sleep settings and no errors.

 

[spidey3]

just to follow up, this was either a chipset vs drive issue or a chipset vs osx lion issue.

my return window was rapidly closing, so i swapped out the jmicron-chipset dock for a lucidport-based one.

two days with the stock sleep settings and no errors.

I am not surprised. I had similar issues with a recent LaCie drive enclosure.

Spidey!!!