A few weird things seem to be happening with my external hard drive all the time. One thing that happens pretty often is windows will give me an error that says something like "This directory is corrupt or unreadable." This is easily fixed with a disk check. I also get a message sometimes randomly such along the lines of "You cannot use this drive until it is formatted." One recent one is that I load some files to it, come back in a day or two and that entire directory is gone. This is really annoying. I leave my hard drive on and plugged in, which I don't think is causing the problem, as I am usually accessing it. I have a SimpleTech SimpleDrive 500GB external hard drive and I have Windows Vista x32 Home Basic SP1. It really annoys me because, I can't put any important information on the drive that I am afraid to lose. Any suggestions on how to fix this or what the problem is?

Unfortunately, that does not help. Thank you for the reply though.