Short story wd external was disconnecting and not reconnecting. So I bought a new terabyte size. It worked and now its doing the same thing but its reconnecting right away. I cant figure out what is wrong. Tried new cables made sure the drives are not allowed to hibernate, but it does this all the time and its annoying me to no end. Everytime it happens it makes the noise and Picasa tries to import the pictures on it even though i told it not to check that drive.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

is it telling the USB to turn off to save power?

Thats the one thing I did I turned off power save on my usb ports.

I'm pretty sure you have to overcome your internal issues before you start worrying about these???

this is a laptop?

No these are all external and its a desktop.

Not sure if you've thought of these:

If you have another computer to hook it/them up to, that would be a wise choice just to be sure it's not the drives that are failing.

Otherwise, if you're PC has both front and rear USB ports, try using the alternate of what you have been (ie. if you currenlt have it plugged into the front USB ports, try the rear ports).

I assume you have other USB devices that work fine on this computer? If so, do you have other USB devices plugged in at the same time as the drives? It's possible that there's not enough power available for all the USB devices.

when you start up your laptop go and check the BIOS and see if that has the ability to turn off USB

This. Maybe time for a new power supply.

Either that or its time for a new motherboard.

Regular USB 2.0 is draws up to .5 amps of +5V = 2.5W so the PSU is probably not the limiter, nor would getting a new PSU increase that limit. PoweredUSB (which I dunno much about but I just looked up -- apparently it's supported by some motherboards but not really a 'standard' yet) draws up to 6 amps at a max voltage of +24V (=144W), but most 3.5" external drives I've seen (which is what I'm assuming this is) have their own external power brick/thing anyways.

Individual ports have a limit of .5 amps (at least on my computer) so enough devices (many draw .1 in my experience) on a hub connected to a single port might exceed that limit.

If you go to Device Manager and view by connection you can see how the USB devices are connected and how much power each draws, how much power each hub has and how much it's handing out to each device.