downloading to external hd stops

[fishwisch]

hi.

i use utorrent to download to my external usb hd, which worked quite well until recently.

my hd auto-shutdowns after ten minutes of inactivity, which never posed a problem to my downloading because utorrent would continually access the drive, preventing the shutdown. since a few days i guess this no longer works: after a while the drive shuts down and utorrent starts cramming the write cache. when i access the drive manually and it starts up again, utorrent doesnt seem to notice and continues downloading to the cache (at a low speed though).

now, is there a way to "notify" utorrent that the drive is there for writing the data down again? and, even better would be help on how to prevent this entire error from happening.

if you need any further info, please ask. oh, and i know that downloading to external usb drives is not recommended.

thanks