External hard drive freezing

[redneon]

I've recently bought one of these:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=372

I've ended up using it as my primary hard drive because my internal one has pretty much died.

I leave my machine (Core Duo 20" iMac) online overnight to download stuff (I set the monitor to switch off after a minute) and the problem I'm having is that when I get up in the morning the hard drive has frozen.

The main light across the middle stays lit constantly and the only way I can get MacOS back is to forceably power the Mac down, unplug the hard drive from the mains and Mac and then plug it all back in and switch on.

As you can imagine, this is really irritating and I'm wondering if anyone knows of a possible solution?

I have tried telling it not to switch the hard drive off (in the power settings) but the problem still occurs.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

You should try updating your drive's firmware, if there's a newer version available. To do this, go to the manufacturer's web site and look for drive firmware. Make sure you use the Mac OS X native installer.

EDIT: Found the firmware link.

 

[Consultant]

Any one of the connected drives dying would cause crashes.

If you didn't mention that your internal drive is almost dead, I would said the external has hardware issues. (Keep in mind that many people have problems with WD drives ).

 

[redneon]

When I say it's almost dead, I'm probably going a bit OTT. It has a few bad sectors. Nothing that have ever stopped my Mac from working fine in the past but I'm so paranoid that eventually one day it'll go that I got this external drive.

I'll try the firmware update and see if I get any joy.