Mini won't sleep with a FreeAgent drive - help!

Howdy. I'm a new mini owner and I'm loving it. I'm having a problem with a FreeAgent USB drive though. Without the FreeAgent, my mini sleeps no problem. However, when the FreeAgent is attached the mini goes to sleep then wakes back up right away. This happens both with the FreeAgent plugged into a hub or plugged into the mini itself. I tried unmounting the FreeAgent before telling the mini to sleep - no change, the mini still wakes up. Any help?????

USB devices can cause unusual behavior in sleep patterns of the host systems, and this particular behavior as you have described it, is not entirely unusual.
If you are able to eject the drive to the icon disappears off the desktop, it shows that there are no active files or processes running on the system which relate to the drive. That's a common sleep-related problem, caused by something active on the device that keeps the system awake.
However, the fact there's nothing active on the drive doesn't mean the drive is not active in itself. In some drives, when the host system sleeps, and once the connection to the device is therefore dropped, the device issues a sleep command and in the case of a drive, will then spin down. Unfortunately, with many drives, when that spin-down occurs, the host system sees it as activity on the bus and wakes up again.
This could be the behavior you are experiencing. I had one such system with a similar problem which was resolved by setting the system to put the hard drive to sleep when possible (in the energy saver preference pane), but another user at the time mentioned that a similar issue had been resolved by UNchecking that option!
Unfortunately, since the Mac commonly relies on input via the USB ports to wake it from sleep, there's no way that I am aware of to prevent it reacting to any activity present there if the external device creates it.

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