USB Drive Disconnects

I have a 160 gigabyte detachable USB hard drive that I use as a second drive for my laptop. I install games and backup data on it. But it's been having problems lately. At random it will disconnect sometimes.

What would cause a USB drive to disconnect at random? Sometimes it disconnects and reconnects immediately after. I've reformatted it, so it can't be a data problem. Could it have to do with the wiring, or the amount of power circulating through a USB port I connect it to?

it could be the usb port on the laptop, try setting it up on another computer and see if it functions fine for a while

It could also be the external hard drive. I bought a Western Digital 500 GB Firewire drive for my mac a week ago. The thing wouldn't connect half the time, and when it did, it would frequently and suddenly drop the connection, often in the middle of file transfers.

But yeah, try it on another computer to test it.

An ACTUAL hard drive? A USB port only provides like 500mA or something, doesn't it have another connector for power? Or some small usb drives use 2 usb connectors, one for power and another for power/data =o

Hard drives can run off of USB 2.0 alone. Mine does, or rather, can, but I have firewire on my mac so I don't use USB.

Probably a power problem, trying to draw too much from your laptop. Do you install and run games off of it?

This sort of thing happened to me with the one I was using on my desktop. The power in the actual case was going bad so I had to break it open and the drive works as an internal SATA drive now lol.