WD My Book Essential Edition, 500G, external USB drive.

Error 0x8007045d: the request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

Formatted the drive as NTFS. Get this error each time I try to backup ~180G of data. Different files each time hit the error: some big (eg 13G), some a lot smaller (eg 30M).

Tried different (built in) USB ports on the XPS 410, same problem.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Dell XPS 410
Vista Ultimate 32bit