OT: USB port expanders and external hard drives

[weaponsgrade]

The external WD hard drive I use for my Mac Time Machine backups suddenly died. Luckily it was just the backup drive. I discovered that Time Machine can backup to two separate external drives so I bought two Seagate Backup Plus Slim External Drives. I didn't have enough USB ports on my Mac Mini so I bought a bought a USB port expander that plugs into the USB-C port on the Mac Mini. It seems that sometimes when the computer goes to sleep and then I wake it backup that a drive gets disconnected and can't reconnect and I get this error saying Time Machine backup failed because the drive is read-only. So, then I run Disk Utility, restart, and everything is fine. At first I thought I got a defective drive, but I've had this happen to both drives. What gives?

[ultraman6970]

IM not a mac person ok? expander like boxes are called hubs....

Im under the impression and makes sense that the pc is cutting the electricity from the USB ports aswell at the time to go to sleep... in pc you can control this, i imagine you can do it in a mac aswell...

Look for the properties of the USB ports and see if they have like an option to have power all the time. Or like... "never go to sleep"... maybe you have like an option that handles the power set up of the computer so when it goes to sleep just disable the screen but the whole computer is still on???

BTW go to sleep is not good idea when you are backing up, the computer needs to be on. Maybe a power profile or something?

Hope this helps.

[Tony T]

Is the the Thunderbolt USB-C on the mini?
If so, could be that the hub is not 100% compatible with the Thunderbolt port.

I would speak/chat to the guys at OWC (https://eshop.macsales.com/) to see if they have a hub to recommend

[pdmtong]

The power draw of the backup drive is too much for the hub

Example is the anker usb-C 5n1 or 7n1 which are rated max 900mA

The Seagate draws power from the USB and exceeds the hub rating so performance is not consistent. The back up needs to be plugged directly into the machine

Or you need to buy a powered USB-C hub

[pdmtong]

I investigated this use case and had multiple conversations with anker. My dell XPS 13 only has three usb-c ports so I needed to figure out the best way to connect everything

[picstloup]

The external WD hard drive I use for my Mac Time Machine backups suddenly died. Luckily it was just the backup drive. I discovered that Time Machine can backup to two separate external drives so I bought two Seagate Backup Plus Slim External Drives. I didn't have enough USB ports on my Mac Mini so I bought a bought a USB port expander that plugs into the USB-C port on the Mac Mini. It seems that sometimes when the computer goes to sleep and then I wake it backup that a drive gets disconnected and can't reconnect and I get this error saying Time Machine backup failed because the drive is read-only. So, then I run Disk Utility, restart, and everything is fine. At first I thought I got a defective drive, but I've had this happen to both drives. What gives?

If this setup doesn't make you happy you might consider an external enclosure that holds 2 or more disks, depending on you needs. I have been using Akitio thunder 2 enclosures with my macbook pro for several years now. I have four bay enclosures. I buy my own drives. They have their own power supplies.

I think akitio was bought by OWC in the last year or so. Now they have Thunder 3 enclosures available. Just more modern connections.

https://www.akitio.com/desktop-storage/akitio-thunder3-quad

[Veloo]

Doesn't the Mac Pro already have 4 slots for internal hard drives?
Adding this is a hard core amount of storage.

====================
Edit
Misread that "Macbook" part.
Still a lot of storage.

If this setup doesn't make you happy you might consider an external enclosure that holds 2 or more disks, depending on you needs. I have been using Akitio thunder 2 enclosures with my macbook pro for several years now. I have four bay enclosures. I buy my own drives. They have their own power supplies.

I think akitio was bought by OWC in the last year or so. Now they have Thunder 3 enclosures available. Just more modern connections.

https://www.akitio.com/desktop-storage/akitio-thunder3-quad

[picstloup]

Doesn't the Mac Pro already have 4 slots for internal hard drives?
Adding this is a hard core amount of storage.

====================
Edit
Misread that "Macbook" part.
Still a lot of storage.

i wrote macbook pro, it's a laptop...

for my needs and redundant backup, i have 2 akitio external enclosures, one connected to computer, the other daisy chained to the back of the first...8 hard drives total, and these days most are 6tb with a couple 8tb thrown in for good measure...i back up my photo library, and then back up again to the other, 2nd enclosure...

I do still have 2 4tb drives, but they are older and will be replaced with 8tb drives...these are 'relatively' inexpensive these days for the amount of storage they provide...

we all have our needs...what seems like overkill for one is just the minimum for others...

[Veloo]

I'd love to have all that storage.
I'm assuming they're not SSD - that would cost a small fortune.

I think I have about 120 mini DV tapes and a ton of VHS tapes (CBS and ABC Tour de France) that need to be backed up before they disintegrate. One mini DV alone is 15 Gigs.

This is not the first time I've heard of a Western Digital HD suddenly failing.
Concerning since my only backup drive is a 2 TB WD My Passport.
However, my old 1TB Lacie HD died after about 2 years. I think in that case it was a power supply.

i wrote macbook pro, it's a laptop...

for my needs and redundant backup, i have 2 akitio external enclosures, one connected to computer, the other daisy chained to the back of the first...8 hard drives total, and these days most are 6tb with a couple 8tb thrown in for good measure...i back up my photo library, and then back up again to the other, 2nd enclosure...

I do still have 2 4tb drives, but they are older and will be replaced with 8tb drives...these are 'relatively' inexpensive these days for the amount of storage they provide...

we all have our needs...what seems like overkill for one is just the minimum for others...

[picstloup]

I'd love to have all that storage.
I'm assuming they're not SSD - that would cost a small fortune.

I think I have about 120 mini DV tapes and a ton of VHS tapes (CBS and ABC Tour de France) that need to be backed up before they disintegrate. One mini DV alone is 15 Gigs.

This is not the first time I've heard of a Western Digital HD suddenly failing.
Concerning since my only backup drive is a 2 TB WD My Passport.
However, my old 1TB Lacie HD died after about 2 years. I think in that case it was a power supply.

Hi. Nope. All but one are the older style spinning hard drives. Totally, ssd with large amounts of storage are still too expensive.

That was one nice thing about these akitio enclosures. They come ready to use with hard drives or ssd's. No adapters needed.

I did move my lightroom catalog and all it's components from the macbook pro drive to an external ssd in the first external enclosure. It's one of those samsung 860 evo ssd's. 1tb. All that lightroom stuff uses now about 300gb. My laptops drive is only 500gb so moving it gave me back a lot of internal space.

The ssd is really fast, even via the external enclosure. All my photo files on the external hard drives. I keep all my applications like Lightroom and Photoshop on the internal laptop drive.

Sufficient free space truly is a load off my mind. As well as all the backups I have. I still need to pop a hard drive into a bay, copy my photo library over and leave it with in-laws or something. This just in case of a fire or something. I've been neglecting that last piece of security, peace of mind.

short ps. after years of reading and research and needing reliable back up methods, it just seemed that 'people who know' always recommend these enclosures with built in fans/cooling. Especially if you use the external hard disks for more than just a short while at a time. I use my drives every day, just about, unless I am away traveling or something. then I just shut everything down. But daily I have auto backups set up. Fingers crossed, I have minimal amounts of drives the last two to three years that died on me. Some say change 'em out every three years. I try and push on for 4, even five years. My oldest drive is from december 2015, but I have that backed up to two other drives, so I'm ok if it goes kaput.

[Veloo]

Is the thinking that heat is one of the contributors to modern day HD failure? The WD My Passport does get a bit warmer when backing up and I've wondered if putting my laptop cooling pad under it would be worthwhile when using it.

[C40_guy]

we all have our needs...what seems like overkill for one is just the minimum for others...

Agreed. I back up my files to a RAID5 NAS. I back up the NAS to a second NAS.

Our Macs use TM to back up to the NAS as well.

And I have external hard disks as secondary TM targets.

And I have an external hard disk that has copies of most files and really should be kept offsite... when I was working in an office, I would keep a disk there...

The photos are also backed up to an online drive...

[unterhausen]

I used usb hubs to power some embedded computers and found out that they spend a lot of effort managing power saving. I had to hard wire them so that the hub couldn't shut down the remote devices, which it seemed to do after a certain amount of inactivity. It was a hassle.

[picstloup]

Is the thinking that heat is one of the contributors to modern day HD failure?

yes...

[weaponsgrade]

I went ahead and returned that USB port expander and ordered a new one that's also powered externally. Hopefully that's all I need. I didn't see anything on my Mac about power options for the ports. In addition to the Time Machine backups I also have a dual bay NAS (WD MyCloud). I run Chronosync and backup my user files to the NAS. Maybe about once a month I'll also use Chronosync to make a complete bootable backup onto a separate external SSD drive.

Last year one of the WD NAS drives failed on the same day the warranty expired. Luckily, I got my warranty claim submitted just in time and WD replaced it. A bit worrisome since the WD NAS drive is WD's red label version and I'm pretty much the only person regularly using the NAS.

The Time Machine drive that failed was a WD Passport. It's been in use for at least 6 years. One day some error message popped up and I ran Disk Utility to try and repair. That didn't work. I then tried hooking up the drive to a different computer. The drive doesn't even want to mount now - even in Disk Utility.

[ultraman6970]

Do you have the nas in raid???

[weaponsgrade]

Yes, mirrored