External Firewire Drives stink?

[Randy Wilson]

I recently bought a Western Digital Caviar 180GB hard drive and a
FireXpress firewire enclosure for it.  So far I've hooked it to my
600Mhz iBook (14.1" LCD), a dual 512MHz G4 desktop, and my old UMAX
SuperMac 180MHz 604e with a firewire card.

It has worked on all three machines for some of the time, but it has
also locked up all three machines multiple times.  One time the power
cord pulled out of the firewire enclosure (which sadly is quite
easy--the connection is kind of loose).  Other times it seems to have
been just sitting there without getting bumped or anything.  Several
times I was running iMovie, twice I was running "Still Life", and twice
I was simply copying some files.

In each case the machine was brought to its knees.  On the UMAX
machine, it of course just locked up (I believe the cursor still
responded, but nothing else did).  Under OS X, the dock still worked,
but the Finder froze and couldn't be relaunched, and I couldn't
force-quit the applications (iMovie, etc.) that were stuck.  One time
the Finder worked for a while until I navigated into the Firewire hard
drive down to the directory where the application was trying to read
from.  Upon double-clicking (i.e., attempting to access) that directory,
I got the spinning lollipop.

Most of the time I couldn't find any way out except to hold down the
power for 3 seconds.  Then it sat there for a half an hour (not sure if
it was doing chkdsk behind the scenes, or if it was just frozen)
spinning the hard drive.

The problem, of course, is I don't know how to fix this, nor whose
fault it is.  Since it happens on 3 different computers, 2 different
operating systems, and several different software packages, I'm assuming
the problem is with the new drive and not the computers.  However, I
have no way to know if it's the firewire case or drive that are acting
up, and I imagine both companies will blame the other.

What has been the experience of others? Are firewire drives supposed to
be able to lock up an OS X machine? What ever happened to the supposed
stability of OS X? Shouldn't it be robust to something as obviously
likely as an external firewire drive being unplugged or turned off?