Trouble with spin-down USB drives

[Stra]

I'm having problems using spin-down USB drives with utorrent.

When downloading at a slow pace, let's say a few kB/s the utorrent client, randomly every few minutes, stops downloading with the error message "The system cannot find the file specified". I then press start again and the thing goes back to normal.

If the downloading is fast, let's say a few hundreds of kB/s, everything is ok.

My guess is, with not enough data coming in to update the download file, the USB drive spins down and when utorrent tries to write the data, it cannot access the drive, hence the error.

If there is enough data coming in, to write to the drive constantly, there are no problems.

I should add that USB drives that do not spin-down work perfectly all the time.

Is this a utorrent problem or is the problem at the system level? I'm using Windows 7. (I had the same problem on the old machine, with Win 7 RC).

[Firon]

Strange. I've had my external spindown before and I've never seen that error. Have you tried a different USB drive, or is it with all of them?

[Stra]

After a bit of scrutiny, there appears to definitively be something else at work here... When the abovementioned problem occurs the system makes the USB disconnected sound. And after one second, the connected sound.

Could be a hardware problem and it appears also when copying large files to the drive. I haven't noticed it so far because I was only copying files of the size of about one or less CD.

Got to look into it... :/