IT Professional

An employee opened a support ticket for the Toshiba 1TB Desktop External Hard Drive that they purchased to make backups of their Imac running Mac O S X 10.6 a few weeks ago. They were having a problem with Time Machine saying there had been no backups made for several weeks.

Problem
The external hard drive has built-in power management settings that causes it to turn off if it isn't in use for 5 minutes. The computer is unable to bring it back out of power saving mode so the hourly, daily, weekly and monthly scheduled backups cannot be performed.

Solution
There is a solution offered for Windows on Toshiba's support website here, but there is not one for Mac OS X. I attempted to call Toshiba technical support but after being redirected several times, I was informed that they do not provide technical support for this external hard drive unless it is 15 days within the purchase. After several hours attempting to search for a resolution on the Internet, I came to the conclusion that it would be more cost effective to have the employee purchase a different external hard drive.

While this is not the best solution in most cases, I believe it makes sense in this one. My reason being is because the external hard drive only cost around $100 to begin with. It would only take on average about 6 hours of our Information Technology staff's labor to equal the cost of that hard drive. Also, this problem could have been bypassed if they had made an informed decision on what external hard drive to purchase by doing some searching for reviews on this model before deciding to purchase it as well as receiving recommendations from the local Information Technology department.