[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.