>Adding to Als train of thought:
>I have a problem with windows disconnecting USB and other non-internal drives regularly, up to the point of diskdrive letter being "gone", then most of the time reconnecting. Sometimes I am asked to format the drive (hiccup in chained drives), no need, data is still there...

Six years ago I had trouble with my then SSD, a 240G Intel something, which would start disconnecting like that. Trying to fix the thing, I found that it gets disconnected after a period of inactivity, so save power. Motor spinning consumes it. Except nobody in Redmond ever thought whether this makes sense for SSD drives...

The point there was that upon reactivation, the windows is sending a wake-up signal, but that's where they didn't talk to each other properly, the protocol wasn't exactly negotiated through, and it wouldn't wake up. But then, it did so for the two years since I had it, and it couldn't be due to updates, because I explicitly forbid them on my box. I was left clueless and eventually ditched the drive.

Just a couple of months ago I found it, in an USB box, and windows boxes wouldn't even recognize it as a drive. But then the linux boxes did, and after I formatted it under linux, the windows boxes recognize it. It's my best network device now.