Problem with External HD - advice needed

Bought a 160 gig 8mb WD hard drive about 3 months ago, mostly for my music. Over the last few weeks it's had a habit of freezing up iTunes and the only thing I could do was pull the plug on my iMac. However, I could live with that.

This last week though, every track I listen to is plagued with these pauses, whereby the track just stops from anything from a second to five seconds or more. I'm assuming there's some delay in reading from the HD. I don't think the problem is with iTunes since I can play a track from my internal HD and everything is fine. This happens even when the only app I have going is iTunes and nothing else is reading/writing to that Hard Drive. It's driving me nuts. I ran Disk Warrior on it, but no improvement.

So last night I decided to put my library back on to my main HD - which meant freeing some space up - so I copied over an iMovie project to my external HD (about 22 gigs in size). I started the copy at about 10pm - by seven this morning it was still copying (had about 4 gigs left to do). This can't be right, surely? Firewire has to be faster than that!

Is my HD screwed? Is there anything I can do before I send it back and try to get refund? Any advice much appreciated. Thanks

 

Thanks for the reply, Crikey. I'll see if I have another cable to swap it out with.