i had the same problem with my seagate external hard drive which i was using for backup's which is brand new. after a power outage my pc was claiming it wasn't able to back up file to the seagate destination. so i erased it and everything is working fine again. there something about power outages they don't like. by the way mine is plugged directly into my pc i have like 8 usb outlets on my tower

Never use a solid state disc like this. You are better off served better with a standard mechanical drive in this case. Constant write cycles in time prematurely wear them down. Or at least decrease backup frequency to like, once every few days to a week in between. Once written to, they can be read from infinitely! But a write cycles shaves a little life off the trail end of all SSD's no matter make, model, application.

Remember too that every gadget you use on a single USB cuts bandwidth down. If there are hefty use devices all plugged into one USB hub then into one port? Well, two devices can bring (theoretically) 450mb/to under 225mb/sec. While three devices will split that so each can only have 150mb/sec. Ooh, and no one device can take up more than 50%of all available bandwidth speed. So suggestions in short:

Leave your low use devices on the hub. Be it scanners, cameras, the occasional thumb drive. Hubs can and do go bad and may need to be replaced. I kill one every year it seems. :P

Put your Porsche drive into a USB port direct to the Mac for best performance and reduce your backup frequency to allow a little more life out of that ssd. This too, plugging it in directly will reduce the chances of an unscheduled dismount that could potentially corrupt the disc. A flaky hub with mouse and keyboard is a nuisance... With a drive, it's down right suicide.

Have to agree. SSD is fast as hell, and unlimited read. It's generally used as a boot drive, or I suppose it could make a good storage drive for FINISHED WORK, that isn't going to be updated. ...but with costs being what they are, I'd probably still back that sort of thing up to optical (multiply) or to one of those new-ish Seagate Archive HHDs.

15 minutes? I assume the idea is to save work in progress? Just get an internal HD, record your backups to there, and limit the number of backups that exist, to prevent storage issues. Internal bus speed should exceed USB by quite a bit. And platters are still cheaper than flash/SSDs.

She has a Mac all in one, no space to move it internally. But yes, that is good advice. ;) I have one, Asus EEEPC with an internal flash ssd (Thanks Striker) that lasted only this long because I registry hacked it to not ever save anything to C: drive. User profiles and program storage all goes out to a c6 sdhc card. Much cheaper to replace as to replace the ssd drive requires total motherboard swap as it is permanently soldered inside. :P

Ooooops, I kinda skipped over that bit in my head.

Well, I'd still prefer the slower drive that's actually going to keep working, myself. I use full-mirror RAID on my PC... and it's been useful more than a few times when something has gotten corrupted. (used to have a lot of power problems - but a big honking Battery Backup took care of those)

UPDATE: 10 Days ago, we had a nasty power outage. It kicked the drive's safety feature into action which is...cut itself off from the network, to preserve the data. >.> I unplugged everything, then are sure everything was clean and undamaged, then plugged it back in...and it's working again, just fine. First thing it did when I turned my machine on? It flushed older back ups and backed everything up.

Basically, it backs up everything every hour on the hour, for 24 hours. Thereafter, the last daily save is retained, for one month. After 12 months build up, it replaces the oldest, with the newest. SO...Far less saving then I thought there was.

regardless, it's running fine now. And Macintosh uses the Time Capsule utility to do all this stuff. The external HD is basically formatted for mac, then time capsule actually boots up and asks if you want to use this HD as your time capsule. Really nifty, and it was $80. Expensive, but it's been three and a half years and only one minor hiccup. >.>

BTW, I took your advice, hon. The drive is connected directly to the back of my computer. The optical mouse is now on the USB hub, with ZERO loss of performance. So, I should be safe and sound. :D Wish my mac keyboard had two USB connectors...one I'd leave for the thumb drives, and stick the mouse in the other.

Yeah, no amount of mouse noodling and keyboard bashing at typical human rates will bog a hub down in the least. I hub my external mouse, keyboard, Webcam and headset/mic combo along with my Wacom tablet together so save on port use on the back of my laptop and desktop. Essentially, all "human interface" gadgetry is pretty low profile and bandwidth intensive. I keep all the direct, spare ports open for my Pinnacle USB capture device, scanner(s) and Printer(s) and a spare port open on the front of the box open for plug in "Fast" USB thumbdrives. My XPS laptop's got a pair of USB 3.x on the back I *love* to use for making backups to external drives - they are blistering fast. And of course, anything plugged into the eSATA/USB dual port on the side will COOK at over 6gb/sec transfer rates.
So yeah, segregate stuff according to speed/demand. Hubbing together the "slowbie" stuff and sharing out the port bandwidth of a single USB is pretty cool and easy to do. High speed, demanding stuff should not be hubbed but rather, connected one at a time or into a dedicated single, hardware port for optimum efficiency and speed. Disc <-> Disc/USB thumb drive transfers done on two separate physical USB ports will be MUCH faster than say, doing the same transfer over a hub - and should be avoided in general practice as it will be SO much slower.

That still sounds like an awful lot of saving... and a very odd priority for it.
24 saves a day, but it keeps one.
We'll call it 30 of those a month. It keeps all 30? or just the last?
And 12 months, after which the... um, either 1 of 12 or 1 of 365 start getting overwritten.

...*shrug* what's important is that it works. And it is, (and obviously does for you) so I'll shaddup now. :)

I know. I took one look at it, and just...tossed hands in air, and said fuck it, and just plugged in. >.> It keeps the most recent daily save, the most recent monthly save, and apparently, 3 years of yearly saves for...only about 86 saves or so.