Why does Time Machine Hang OSX when a USB drive does not respond?

I use USB drives to store photo data. When I back up the drives using Time Machine to a Time Capsule, If I have added a large amount of data to the USB drive, the backup will consistently fail with the drive hung. I can see the drive in finder, but I cannot see the directory structure. Often OSX hangs too and I cannot even get to finder, just the whirling colored wheel. Sometimes the system has entered sleep mode and it will not wake up. I if I am using the monitor, I can open the MAC Book Pro cover and the screen there shows alternately, a blue screen and the screen wallpaper, flipping back and forth but otherwise unresponsive. If I turn the USB drive off the OS recovers and Time Machine completes, usually indicating a backup failure (but not always). The drive is always very hot under these circumstances, indicating that the system is issuing repetitive operations to the drive. I should emphasize that I am not writing to the USB drives during backup, Time Machine is just reading the drive. So several questions:
1) How in the world can a non system drive hang the Operating System? This is a big no-no for a supposedly multi-tasking Operating System.
2) I use Aperture 2.1 to store data on the USB drives with no problems (at least so far). Why would Time Machine drive the USB drive so hard that it fails? I had the same problem using a USB drive with iTunes. It completely fried the drive by writing to it too intensively during one of the frequent software updates. Is there no throttle mechanism in OSX that limits the disc activity so that the throttle mechanism is not the failure of the drive itself?
3) Does Apple have a list of USB drives that it has validated to be able to work with it's system reliably?

Are the USB drives powered from the computer or do they have their own power supplies.
There is a limit to how much power can be drawn from each USB port and also a total limit. If you exceed this, unexpected things can happen.

Similar Messages

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    timtom122353 wrote:
    "The backup was not performed because an error occurred while copying files to the backup disk."
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    bradleydad wrote:
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    Eddie Ski wrote:
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  • Time Machine works, but when disconnected keeps saying "Could not complete backup"

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    +1
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  • How much extra space does time machine need to backup a 512gig drive?

    ... in practice, how big does my backup drive need to be for 512gig primary drive?
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    Web Wizard wrote:
    Any other solutions to this quandary?
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    If you don't need hourly backups, you can get a smaller disk and clone with SuperDuper or CarbonCopy Cloner. You can schedule a backup nightly, if that enough.
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    -mj

  • Does time machine need a dedicated external hard drive or can I partition it?

    I am trying to figure out the best way to back up my husband's computer.  He has too much data so I need to get about 80 GB off his computer on to an external drive and then need to back that up as well.  Right now I have two external drives one dedicated to time machine and one that backs up as a carbon copy bootable backup.  I think both external drives are 500GB, but he is on the computer and I don't want to fuss with having him get off right now.  I ordered an additional external drive so I have some where for his 80 GB of his data.  I can take one of the external drives currently used for time machine and partition it (mac OS journaled) and use one of the parts for time machine and the other for the 80 GB of data.  Will this affect our ability to get data off of time machine in the event his 5 year old hard drive dies?  The 80 GB of data includes important photos, so I would like them in two places.  I would consider cloud, but he is running Leopard and I know that iCloud only works with Lion.

    Thanks to everyone for all your opinions and thanks to baltwo for this TM FAQ website.  Before asking this question, I browsed the internet and some people advised that a hard drive needed to be dedicated.  It seems now that if I partition the external drive and have a big enough drive that I should be ok.

  • Does Time Machine work with a partitioned external drive?

    I just bought my first Mac this weekend (yay!) and would like to use the external Maxtor drive I used for backups with our Windows machines with Time Machine. The problem is we still have two Windows machines that were using this drive as a backup and I would like to continue to do so. Can I put two partitions on the drive, one for Mac and one NTFS for the Windows machines, hook the drive up to my iMac with the Firewire and have Time Machine use the Mac partition while I share the Windows partition for use by the Windows machines? Any insight would be appreciated.
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    HD

    Never mind. I found a post from April 8th where a similar question was asked and it appears as though the answer is yes.
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