External hard drive won't power back up when iMac wakes from sleep

I have the external hard drive connected via USB. I always put my iMac to sleep before going to bed and I wake it up when I come home from work. Except that when I do, the external hard drive doesn't power up. It still shows in Finder, but clicking on it's folders just opens them up as if they were empty. There's no access noise and the drive can't be ejected.I have to switch it's power off and turn it back on for it to spin back up.
At first I thought it was because I had Energy Saver set to power down the drives whenever possible, which works just fine when it's on, the drive powers on and off as needed just as long as the iMac doesn't go to sleep. I turned it off just to make sure and it made no difference. As soon as the iMac goes to sleep and the drives powers down, it will not come back on without a power cycle once the iMac wakes.
I've used this drive in an old Macbook for years without having this problem. The only difference is that the Macbook was on 10.6.8. I was thinking about buying a 4 bay USB enclosure and filling it up with hard drives, but I'm not about to do that if every time I put the iMac to sleep, the whole thing will not power back on without a power cycle.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Not sure if you managed to get this issue resolved yet Marcus, but I too have a similar problem:
Currently I'm upgrading from Leopard to Lion (via Snow Leopard) on both an iMac and MacBook Pro (both Intel), but before I proceed with the OSX upgrade I wanted to back everything up. Thus far I have partitioned an external firewire drive (G Drive - one that is bootable), and cloned each machine using Carbon Copy Cloner to it's own partition (both GUID). There is plenty of space left over on each partition.
The issue - I can boot the OS X from the external drive on the MacBook Pro but not on the iMac.
When I restart and hold down Option on the iMac the only drive that appears is the HDD, not the other two selectable drives that are visible if I boot up on the MacBook Pro. On the iMac in System Prefs > Startup Disc I can see all 3 drives but when I select it and restart, the machine freezes on the grey loading screen and goes no further.
Not that it should make a difference, but there is a 3rd partition on the external drive that is currently empty (for extra storage).
Any help is greatly appreciated - I can't find any relevant answers elsewhere. Thanks,
Dan

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