Hello. I recently bought an external hard drive, since my computer only came with 8gigs. It's a 40gb one btw. Anyway, it works pretty well, except if I'm not using it for a certain period of time (ie, not running an mp3 off it, or downloading to it, etc), it becomes unaccessible. To be specific I get a blue screen saying: "Disk Write Error: Unable to write to disk in Drive D. Data or files may be lost." This scared the heck out of me the first time it happened, but I rebooted and it goes back to normal (all files are fine and in tact). And it's fine until I don't use it for maybe a half-hour to an hour. I'm very confused! Any idea what's making this happen? Could the USB cable be defective or something? Please reply! Thank you! :)

Check your power saving options, you may not be aware that this device is being powered off!

This is gonna sound reeeeally dumb, but how do I check my power saving options? Thanks! :)

Brian's talking about the power options you find in the Control Panel. You open Power Options and it has drop down menus for your Monitor, Hard Disks and Standby. Choose "Never" for your hard drives. And belieeeeeve me- there are no dumb questions here! You'll get some ignorant answers sometimes, from people who THINK they're all that smart- don't let 'em rattle ya- we're ALL learning in here!