External Hard Drive for Time Machine - 2 TB. Can I remove other external drives it was backing up?

I have an external drive dedicated for Time Machine, it's 2 TB. Last year I started backing up computer (500 GB) and one external hard drive that has 500 GB. IAlso, I have another external drive that is 1 TB connected to my computer. I noticed last week that I was hearing that other external drive sounding funny, so I thought I would add it to Time Machine to back up. Now today my Time Machine failed. I tested the drive or verified the drive and all was well. My thought is because I added this drive to Time Machine it failed because of not enough room? Is there a way to remove that other external hard drive and go back to just the computer and the 500 GB?
I did btw out of a panic mode buy the GDrive that has Thunderbolt with 3 TB, yet I can't use Thunderbolt because that plug is used for my monitor, bummer. But, maybe using this new external drive I can back up the 500, the computer and the 1TB. Any thoughts?

aashton wrote:
Now today my Time Machine failed. I tested the drive or verified the drive and all was well. My thought is because I added this drive to Time Machine it failed because of not enough room? Is there a way to remove that other external hard drive and go back to just the computer and the 500 GB?
When you say the Time Machine failed, do you mean the drive containing the Time Machine backups failed, or what failed was trying to back up the new drive you added? If Time Machine was able to complete the first full backup of the new drive, then adding Time Machine didn't cause the problem, it was a coincidence. If Time Machine runs out of space it just starts deleting the oldest backup. I suppose it might fail on the first Time Machine run after the initial backup if it didn't have space to delete stuff. When you look at the Time Machine drive in the Finder, is it in fact full? If there's plenty of space left on it, it's not clear what the failure was about.
Also, testing and verifying with Disk Utility will spot some problems but not all.
aashton wrote:
I did btw out of a panic mode buy the GDrive that has Thunderbolt with 3 TB, yet I can't use Thunderbolt because that plug is used for my monitor, bummer. But, maybe using this new external drive I can back up the 500, the computer and the 1TB. Any thoughts?
Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained, so if it or other Thunderbolt devices have a pass-through port it might be possible to do all that. But it might be better to return the drive and get a USB 3 drive instead. It would be fast enough, cheaper, and more versatile. For a single hard drive (not a RAID or SSD), Thunderbolt is not really much faster than USB 3.

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