Windows 7: 2.5" External drive "falls asleep"?!?!

So I've been up for hours this morning, fighting with a brand new Seagate 500Gb Extension 2.5" portable hard drive.
While transferring 120Gb of information from the drive to an internal drive, it often stops copying/moving halfway through. It seems to happen mostly on large (1Gb+ files), but has also happened on smaller 200Mb files.
When it stops copying/moving, the destination drive is accessible, but if I try to access the files on the 2.5" it freezes and gives me the not responding message. If instead of accessing the files however, I click on my computer in the same window, the copying/moving resumes!

Prior to discovering this, I had been opening task manager and attempting unsuccessfully to kill the processes, and then explorer, which would close but not restart itself. I then had to open powershell and restart explorer from there.

Unplugging the 2.5" would also stop the hung copy process, and I'm hoping it hasn't corrupted any of my files! (only tried it twice).



The Seagate came default formatted in NTFS, and I'm using Windows 7 64bit. I also have USB suspend disabled.

Any ideas?

i found this program today im using to see how my drives are doing HDDScan
and it has lots of features here are some key things (oh and its free)

Reading and analyzing identity information from ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire/SCSI HDD.
Changing AAM, APM, PM parameters on ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire HDD.
Reporting defect information on SCSI HDD.
Spindle start/stop function on ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire/SCSI HDD.
Reports can be saved in MHT format.
Reports can be printed.
Skins support.
Command line support.
SSD SMART and Identity reports

the feature i found good is in the screen shot automatic acoustic management you may find some useful info for yourself?

Go to seagate's website and download their diagnostic program "Sea Tools". It is the test they provide and the only one they will accept if you are considering RMA. It includes several diagnostic tools for their Hard drives.

I had Seatools installed and ran it, although I didn't believe that the drive itself was faulty in any way.
Seatools confirmed this with all of the tests passed.
Could it be that because it's listed in Computer as a hard drive and not a device with removable storage, that perhaps Windows is putting the drive into some sort of power save mode, even though it's being read from at the time?