Tell them, my song.

Time Machine has a problem with my external hard disk. It all began when the backup reached the 1 TB barrier: Time Machine “failed to create a directory”, or whatever the exact message was. The disk had around a Terabyte of free space left when that happened and even using Disk Utility to “repair” the drive didn’t help. Neither did formatting the disk and starting with a fresh backup fix the problem. I have now disabled Time Machine and copy my files manually to the disk – which, very unsurprisingly, does work. So it’s not a hardware problem but very obviously some weird bug in Time Machine. As Steve Jobs would have said in a different context with a different meaning: “This is huge.”

The 27″ iMac i5 now has temperature problems. Even in idle state, the cooling fans begin to work heavily and produce a lot of noise. SMC and PRAM resets only postpone the noise production a bit but have not fixed it. This is a serious problem.

After a couple of days of using Mountain Lion, the overall performance of the system does not feel any better than it did with Lion. The Mac felt really fast when it was still running Snow Leopard, but with Lion and Mountain Lion it feels not much different than a PC with Vista. It’s still okay, but not good.

I still haven’t tried the new Contagion drivers, so I don’t know if the RAT7 problems have been fixed. In any way, that is not a direct Mountain Lion problem and it’s not essential – only annoying.

Still, the Time Machine and cooling fan problems are troublesome show-stoppers and I need to decide how I am going to deal with this.

Update: The beta driver 1.1.45 fixes the Cyborg RAT7 compatibility problems – so far, everything appears to be working normally again. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Mountain Lion, just like its predecessor Lion, randomly ejects my backup hard disk or loses the connection to it – regardless if I connect it via USB or Firewire. When I connect it to my virtual machine with Windows 7, this problem does not seem to occur. However, I don’t have enough time to spend on a thorough analysis. When I read how many other people have issues with their non-Apple backup disks, I tend to say that Apple broke something in their software.