[Leica] -Another-Question Re Backing Up to External Hard Drives

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

> However, it does something on my G5 iMac I don't like;
> when the energy-saver puts the system to sleep, it
> reads the hard drive as having been improperly
> removed, the system wakes back up, won't go to sleep,
> and I keep getting the error message that a USB device
> has been improperly removed.

A USB hard drive has two separate mechanisms, usually designed and 
manufactured by different companies:
 * The hard drive itself
 * The USB interconnect enclosure.
The USB interconnect enclosure contains electronics that obey USB protocols, 
send commands to the disk, and send disk responses back to the computer. 
There is a fairly significant amount of electronics in this enclosure.

The situation that you describe is a failure of the enclosure electronics, 
either because it is designed wrong, because it is configured wrong, or 
because some part of it has failed. I just looked up your WDG1SU5000N drive 
on the Western Digital website, and it does not have any configuration 
switches or knobs or settings, so this is probably a design error in the 
enclosure electronics, probably because the designers focused on PCs instead 
of Macs.