[timmmee]

I just upgraded to Leopard and have an external 500GB hard drive formatted in two, one for movies and one for Time Machine backups.

Question 1:
Is the external hard disk really supposed to be connected all the time for Time Machine? I'm not talking about physically, but within the operating system itself. When I eject the disk via the sidebar, OS X makes no attempt to find it again if I click the Time Machine dock icon. I don't really mind leaving it on indefinitely otherwise except I wouldn't want my hard drive to be "up and running" all the time as it currently sounds like it is, with nothing apparently being transferred.

Question 2:
This has more to do with files than hard drives. My other half of the hard drive is for movies I own ripped into an iPod format so I can pick which ones I want and send them over to iTunes to be synced if I'm going on vacation or whatever. They've all been given the special DVD cover art treatment that makes them look quite fly in iTunes. However, I was disappointed to find that the Finder CoverFlow doesn't reflect this. Is there some way I can edit their random screenshot of the film so I can get a useful version of CoverFlow for these files on the hard drive?

[Shades of Blue]

As far as question 1 goes, have you tried clicking the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" checkbox in the Energy Saver preference pane? Ejecting the drive means that, so far as I know, Mac OS X isn't going to look for it again until you disconnect and reconnect it. You want the drive to stay mounted, but just go to sleep when it's not being used. Right?

[timmmee]

That sounds like a reasonable answer, but I checked my system preferences and it's already been activated.

[Shades of Blue]

Even when I had that box checked, my Time Machine drive often woke up shortly after falling asleep; I don't know why Leopard has to fiddle with that drive more often than during its hourly backup, but it does. Maybe yours is doing it often enough that it never bothers sleeping.

[RobUSVI]

Originally Posted by Shades of Blue I don't know why Leopard has to fiddle with that drive more often than during its hourly backup, but it does.

I haven't looked into it yet, but I suspect that spotlight is indexing the new data on the disk from time machine. Time machine makes a backup, disk goes idle and gets put to sleep, spotlight notices the idle time and indexes the new data on the disk, time machine makes a backup...

[Shades of Blue]

I thought that was the only reason too, but now I have Spotlight ignoring my Time Machine volume altogether and it still wakes up more often than during backups. And the zillion copies of an application from the Time Machine volume still show up in some of my "Open with..." menus. Pretty annoying.