If there is a way to turn off the energy saving features of your enclosure the answer would be in your documentation for the drive or with Western Digital. Quite honestly I think WD has that feature to protect the drive from heat. My unscientific analysis is that their external drives were failing at an unacceptable rate. You may be able to purge the software that resides on the drive somewhere. That may be the source of the shutdowns. However doing so may disable any other features included with the package. I suggest you contact WD by email and inquire as to haw you can disable the feature and the ramifications.

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As you kno, the mybook drives aren't bus powered so perhaps the power connecter on the inclosure is loose which would cause the powering on and off of the drive - (Fairly basic idea but theres no reason why it couldn't be true) Othehill: you are correct, the mybooks do tend to fail quite often and with out any worning, I alone lost over 350 gb a couple months ago and several people I kno also seem to have lost large amounts of data.

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Wow that's not good. Maybe I will just buy a new one. Can you recommend a better brand? The one I have is a 500 GB with two drivers so it's mirroring the data but still...

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brh993 The culprit is most likely heat. Is there a cooling fan built into the enclosure? What you have is two hardd rives, not drivers. Drivers are software that interface with the operating system and the hardware. I wasn't inferring that failure is immenent. I just surmised that the manufacturer attempted to kill two birds with one stone by spinning down the drives. The first is to save energy, which the government has been pushing. The second is to reduce heat, which is the enemy of electronics. Laptops have used this strategy for years. What I would suggest to you is this. Do not totally rely on the external drive. Use it as you backup copy of important files. Maintain the primary copy on your computer on an internal drive. If you have critically important files you might consider burning those to optical media. IMHO that is the most secure, affordable, in house method. While your external enclosure is more secure, IF you ARE using the RAID feature, external drives in general appear to have a higher failure rate than their internal counterparts. You should always maintain at least TWO copies of any data you wish to retain.

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I can't maintain two copies because the internal drive on my laptop doesn't have enough space to do that - hence the 500 GB RAID. Is there a better brand of external to use? The external drive does have a very loud fan built in that comes on from time to time.

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I am not saying that brand is necessarily bad. All of the externals are vulnerable to heat. If there is a fan that is good. If you are mirroring then you theorically have two copies. If you have extremely important data I suggest you also burn to CD/DVD. that is a more dependable method IMO. Capacity is the issue. If you do burn data to disk be sure to verify the burn was good by randomly accessing a few files. All external drives need to have a disk controller circuit in the case. Sometimes that circuitry may die. Sometimes the drive itself will die. You are writing to TWO drives so that is much better. However, the circuitry can sometimes die and take the drive/s with it. That can also occur with the internal equivelents. That is why you need two copies. Your setup is better than using a single drive or using the unit you have as a 1TB extended drive. If your drive ever quits on you it may be possible to remove the harddrives from the enclosure and connect via a different enclosure, install internally on a desktop, or buy a spcecial cable that interfaces with the drive directly. I wouldn't worry too much about the possibility of failure but keep in mind that all harddrives will eventually fail if kept in service long enough. We didn't solve your original issue but you have gotten an education.

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