Hi, i'm running Windows XP SP2, and using http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=17-145-657&depa=0 enclosure to house a 300 Gig Seagate Hard drive. Both are brand new. Everything installed and formatted ok. But several times the hard drive has just stopped responding. I would be playing an mp3 that resides on the external drive, and the sound would suddenly stop. I would also hear a rather loud noise coming from the hard drive when this occurs. like a lick sound. I would have to turn the hard drive off and turn it back on for it to work. I thought this was a firewire problem, but even with USB, i am having this problem. I checked the disk for errors and everything seems to be ok. Does anyone have any ideas on what might be happening? The Hard drive checks out ok on checkdsk, with no errors or bad sectors. Thank you very much!

Clicking noises from hard drives are never a good sign and even though it's new it's possible it's going faulty. To isolate the problem try putting the drive into your PC and see it it exhibits the same symptom. As a precaution I would backup NOW anything on it which is irreplaceable.

If it's an ST3300831A I don't think the problem is necessarily with your enclosure. My Seagate did the same on enclosures with the following chipsets: Oxford 911 FW, Cypress USB, Genesys 811 USB. The drive would just "disappear" from My Computer, and only a power cycle would restore it. When I moved it onto an nForce2 IDE controller, it got worse. After 5-25 minutes it would pull the same disappearing act--any programs that were accessing the drive at the time would freeze, and I couldn't terminate them in Task Manager. Only a reboot would restore the drive. This also happened when connected to a Highpoint Rocket133 PCI ATA-6 controller. I was using MS' default IDE drivers rather than the nVidia ones. The drive itself is fast as hell when it works, but I think there are some pretty bad compatibility issues, at least with the controllers I tried it on. Check your System Event Log and let us know which disk errors you're getting. "if it ain't broke, upgrade anyway."

Thank you to both who answered. Yep it is a Seagate ST3300831A. I am about to turn off my PC and stick it internally and see what the problem is. Let me paste the errors in my Event Log: The device, , did not respond within the timeout period. An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation. {Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file . The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere. Those are the 3 i keep getting in my event viewer. Thanks again! I will follow up with how it goes internally.

Yep it was the drive. Did two tests. PUt it internally: didn't work put a well-used and tested hard drive into the enclosure, and it worked great. So it was definitely the Seagate drive. Thanks again for your assistance guys, and tropic, wow, i guess Seagate had some quality issues with these drives. Best Regards