External Hard-Drive Randomly Ejects; Stays On

Question

My 250GB I/O Magic USB external hard-drive randomly disconnects / ejects from the computer after between 2-30 minutes of use. When this happens, the blinking activity light on the front of the hdd turns off; however, the disks can still be heard spinning. Unplugging & replugging in the USB does not reconnect the device and the activity light remains unlit. The only way to continue using it is to flip off then on the power switch of the hdd.

The hard-drive was formatted with MBR partition table and 2 NTFS volumes. I recently tried switching to GUID with two Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but the problem remains.

This error occurs with my new Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard as well as with my DELL E520 with Windows 7 Ultimate.

Answer 1

Sometimes Spotlight will cause this for some reason, but you said it also happens on Windows 7, so it leads me to believe it is a problem with the hardware.

Before considering to RMA the drive, try a different USB cable. It could be the External hard drive's USB port or some other internal component.