external hard drive problem

i have a Western Digital external Hard drive and when i copy big files over to it or its in use for a while (info is constantly being fed to it) it freezes and i get the write failure and the HD becomes unusable untill i pull the plug and put it back in. the HD acts liken its been disconnected when its not and the light that that blinks when info is being passed stayes lit up. is there anything that i could do to stop this its really annoying casue i cant do much stuff on it when it does that. firm wear is up to date and this HD is about 4 years old but not that that matters much

u ever try taking the drive out of the case and plugging it internally? would be my first troubleshooting step

its hooked up to a laptop

ahhh i see, sounds like the hdd might be on its way out.

how big are the files that you are transferring?

is your external drive ntfs or fat?

its ntfs and i use it mainly to store all my video editing work so the files can get nice and big exporting/importing, rendering etc

are we talking bout videos larger then a gig? or like 7-800 megs?

well combined its larger than a gig

First of all, what connection do you use?

USB?

Firewire?

Is your laptop USB 2.0 compatible?

Smells like your USB sucks

firewire casue it was made right b4 USB 2 came out

actually just a little update on this, i did a diagnostics test that WD has to download and it found something it says that the test found bad sectors that may be repairble whatever that means. and when i hit ok it says back up the drive first cause it will delete the stuff in thoes sectors

u might wanna try a hard format on that drive. back everything up and use data lifeguard tools and choose the option to write zeros to the drive. that should set the drive back to new. could help a lot.