New External Hard Drive

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Hello,

I just purchased a new 320GB Toshiba USB 2.0 Portable External HD to back up my music and photos etc. but when I plugged it in it asked if I wanted to use with Time Machine so I did and it is working perfectly but my concern is should I eject the HD every time I put my iMac to sleep or shut down,will it damage the drive if not ejected?Also how do you partition the drive with OSX in case my internal HD ever failed and I could use the external.



Thanks
 

chscag

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You do not have to eject the drive when the machine sleeps or shuts down. No damage to files or the drive should occur. Also Time Machine works best when the drive is attached all the time.

Partitioning can be accomplished with Disk Utility. Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility.

Regards.
 
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Similar problem

I also have an external hard drive dedicated to time machine, and do not disconnect on switching off, however i always get the message that the device was not ejected properly and may cause problems, I am directed to eject it from finder.
Is this normal - or is there a way to let iMac know that the ex HD is part of the family :)
 
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Ya this problem only happened maybe 10 years ago, OS' have figured out how not to damage HDD when going to sleep now a days.
 

Slydude

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It's a bit odd that you are getting that error though. I have an external drive connected to my Mac as well as an external connected to my Time Capsule. Neither of the drives gives me that error on a regular basis. Try running Disk Utility on the drive and see if the verify disk routine picks up any errors.
 
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will do, thanks Slydude.

for time machine to work - I reconnect the ext hd -
after back up,
if I forget to eject from finder then
I get the error the next time I turn on mac.

The ext hd won't back up unless I disconnect and reconnect usb for ext hd.
I would have imagined that all this should just work invisibly behind the scene.
 

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