External Hard Drive Automatically Unmounting?

Hey everyone,

A few months ago I bought an external hard drive enclosure and a hard drive and I have always had this issue. If I try to copy or read a large number of files within a given amount of time, the hard drive will seemingly unmount from Windows. An example: I was recently dumping 40GB of music into iTunes. I know it's not any type of cable issue, and in order to get it working again I have to turn off the external hard drive, wait a few seconds for the drive to spin down, and turn it on again. Simply disconnecting and reconnecting the cable doesn't work. Another weird thing happens when I go into Disk Management after this occurs. I see the drive there, but it says it's uninitialized and that the space is unallocated, but when I turn the drive off and then back on, it sees the filesystem again. This sounds like it's an issue of the external hard drive malfunctioning. Any tips, or does it sound like I need another enclosure? Has anyone else had this problem with other hard drive enclosures (this one is from Mad Dog Multimedia).

Thanks,
corndog

 

Hi. Could you give system and os info, and more about the drive? Is it FAT32 or NTFS? I wonder if the power supply is undersized. Anyway, let us know some details. Good night and good luck.