Any problems with the Plug having external hard drive trouble?

[hansamurai]

When I bought the Plug I had a 1TB Western Digital hard drive ready for it, and all went well for about two months or so, until things started to go crazy with the mount and I eventually plugged it into my main Ubuntu 9.04 system which immediately reported a ton of SMART errors, lots of bad sectors (I'm not blaming the SheevaPlug, hoping it was just a bad coincidence). I replaced it with another Western Digital drive (they have a nice advanced RMA... just wish I never had to use it), and after six days, I started getting "Input/output error" and "device is busy".  I restarted the Plug and all was fine.

Now, after exactly three days of uptime (I was streaming some media from the HDD/Plug and it suddenly died and I immediately ran uptime: 3 days, 1 minute), I got the error again.  I wasn't able to umount normally (device busy), so I unplugged it and plugged it into my desktop, thankfully no SMART errors, all is well.  I plugged it back into the plug and umount -l, mount -a worked.

Anyone else experience anything fishy like this?  Willing to provide any other info if it helps.

[fragfutter]

i have a 2.5" USB drive connected and it is running fine for four months without any hitches. It is only serving as a data store, operating system is on SD Card. The USB even does spindowns when not in use.

[hansamurai]

I have a feeling the hard drive puts itself into standby mode or something if it's not used after X amount of hours, because it happened again the other day when I was using it, but since then I've made sure it's gotten more attention and it's been fine.  Odd.

As a warning, it's a WD Essentials, I never had this problem with my old Element though.