[Ti] problem with Firewire External drive using WiebeTech DriveDock

[Macintosh info]

I have been having a problem with my 120 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM ATA hard drive,
partitioned into five volumes, connected via firewire to my TiBook 400 using
a WiebeTech Super Drive Dock. I am currently on OS X 10.3.2 build 7D24 and
the Maxtor is always the end of the chain (the DriveDock has only one
firewire port, of course). The two preceding items, starting from the port
on the computer: (1) VST SmartDisk FireWire CD-R/W drive (2) IBM 2.5" 10g
TravelStar using a Sarotech firewire enclosure.

I always run this configuration off A/C power, and, I might add, the
WiebeTech DriveDock has its own A/C via a power brick.

What happens is that the external drive goes to unwakeable sleep
after a random period of time. The computer might be downloading files
unattended, or not.  It might be working with open files that have been
saved to the internal drive, or saved to one of the Maxtor's external
partitions. It doesn't really seem to matter.  The only time the drive does
not exhibit this behavior when attached to my TiBook is when it is the BOOT
drive... And it NEVER behaves this way when attached to my Snow iMac as
either the boot- or non-boot drive.

In the Energy Saver control panel, I have the following settings for Power
Adapter use: 

[Never] -- "Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for:" ...
[Unchecked] -- "use separate time to put the display to sleep" ... and
[Unchecked] -- "put the hard disk to sleep when possible."

In this condition, if any application launches that might poll the firewire
bus (like Disk Utility) or if you click any one of the volumes, you get the
spinning beach ball and there is no way to get out of it. Attempting to
Force Quit brings up no window.

There are two courses of action: a hard restart (followed by unplugging the
Maxtor/WiebeTech drive otherwise you'll never reach the login screen), or,
simply disconnecting the Maxtor/WiebeTech drive by pulling its firewire
cable out with no hard restart. You get the message from the system about
improperly removing a firewire device, but at least you get control of the
computer again without a restart.

The drive can be reconnected to the firewire chain only after powering it
down (removing the A/C cord), then powering it up again. It is almost as if
it had gotten stuck mid-read/write somehow, because after reconnecting it,
you hear proper disk activity again as it spins up.

Other ATA drives (such as an old Quantum 4 gig) never exhibit this behavior.
Could it be that the Maxtor doesn't like being formatted into 5 partitions,
or that it has a problem with the relative sizes of the partitions (the
biggest is 40 gig and the smallest is 650 mb)  ?

I have already communicated back and forth many times with the WiebeTech
support guy, but I don't think he'll be able to conclude anything without
physically working with my drive and DriveDock, and that's not possible.

Any ideas?

Bill Planey