It's been my experience (and I've seen it noted elsewhere in the forums here) that that is not entirely true. If you don't create the dependency, you can't see the drive in any of the GUIs but if you were to run "BACKUP DATABASE [dbname] to disk = '<newdrive>:\folder' " it would work (assuming NTFS permissions had been set correctly of course). The same applies if you put the command in a scheduled task.