Lion won't sleep when my external USB drive is connected

Hi guys,
I've searched the forums and can't find anyone with quite the same problem I'm experiencing here. I've noticed that my power saving settings are not being actioned properly on my 2011 mac mini, in that the system never goes to sleep at the specified interval.
This isn't a problem that the system will not sleep at all, if I manually put the computer to sleep it obeys and goes to sleep instantly, also when using Plex media centre software, and allowing it to control the system sleep state, it also works fine.
After some digging, I found using pmset -g assertions that the system won't sleep normally because of the following
Listed by owning process:
  pid 20: [0x0000012c00000014] ExternalMedia named: "com.apple.powermanagement.externalmediamounted"
At first I wondered if it was because of some network shares I had mounted, which is not the case, it does however seem to be because of my external USB hard drive. As soon as I unplugged this, the assertion went away and pmset reports sensibly and the system can sleep.
The problem is that I use the external drive to store quite a lot of media (the built-in HD is not nearly big enough to store both the OS *and* all my files), so what gives? Why will Lion refuse to go to sleep when I have an external USB HD attached, and yet sleep perfectly willingly when I explicitly tell it to do so?
Any help will be gratefully received - suggestions of buying a new external HD to see if it helps shall not be entertained and dismissed forthwith, as this setup worked perfectly well with Snow Leopard and an old style mac mini.

I am stumped too. The issue is that the 'pmset -g' command does not allow changing the ExternalMedia flag.
An observation that may be relevant to this topic is as follows: if you unmount the drive (but not physically disconnect it), sleep comes in the specified time. Upon wakeup, however, the drive is mounted again to the desktop. I've noticed this behavior with SD cards, and I assume that HDs should do the same.
If this is the case, then it may be possible to use ControlPlane (current version is ControlPlane-1.1.4) and create an "about to sleep" situation, which triggers USB disk unmounting. Haven't tried it, but was thinking to (subsequently just gave up and eject my USB  storage manually).
Hope this helps.
Xen

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