[Myles O2L]

Recently added a Western Digital My Book Home external hard drive (1TB). Drive is attached using an eSATA cable to a new PNY eSATA PCI card. New drive is being used strictly for storage (audio/video) and backup information. SATA configuration is 0. The drive was reformatted under Windows to NTFS successfully. Write/Read to drive works great and appears healthy under Windows Disk Management. Problem: Intermittently (1-2 days) I lose the drive (does not appear on the drive tree). If I simply power off the drive/power back up, the drive magically reappears in the tree and is fully accessible, and remains usable during activity. I have changed the connection from one eSATA port on the card to the other, I have isolated the power supply to a single plug-in vs. a surge block with multiple plugs, to no avail. The drive acts as if it goes into some kind of power down/sleep mode but I cannot locate where this trigger may be located. This is a major inconvenience since the media files on this hard drive are utilized in Windows Media Player 11 and shared over a wireless router. If anyone has a suggestion or tip, I would greatly appreciate it. I did not receive any solution from Western Digital tech support.

[philthomas]

A couple of things worth trying :

Try the PCI Card in a different slot
See if there is an updated driver for the PNY Card

Also .... does this drive have a USB2 connection as well as eSATA ? .... if so, try plugging it into a USB Port and see if the problem disappears.

[sthycb]

Try booting with it on..

Also if your Mother board has SATA on it plug in there with a SATA - eSATA cable (if you have one)

Also see if they have any control software on the WD site as some can go to sleep (timed sleep or sometimes because of temperature.)