External HD Error

In the UK some F3 models are supplied with an external 160GB hard drive, don't know about everywhere else. This is a nice sales sweetener, and together with the 2 year warranty it swung me away from the Vaio I was interested in and I bought an F3, no regrets about that. The external drive has USB2 and ESATA connectivity, with cables for both being supplied, but my F3 does not have an ESATA connection so it was USB for me. No problems at all, until I installed Acronis True Image Home. Acronis would create a backup image on the external drive, but when I tried to verify the image a 'bad sector' error was reported, and simultaneously Vista would report that 'an attached USB device has failed'. This happened several times, but because it is not possible to run low-level check and fix via USB I was unable to establish if the drive was truly faulty, I was not keen to remove it from the housing and install it in the lappie.

To resolve this I gave Amazon UK £17 and they sent me an express card with 2 x ESATA ports. I was then able to run chkdsk/f, which pronounced the external drive innocent. Sure enough, Acronis now creates drive images (much faster!) and verifies them as OK. So the USB interface on the external drive would seem to be faulty, yet I have used it many times for large file reads and writes, movies mostly, with no issues at all. Only with Acronis, and only when verifying a backup image is there an problem. Could it be a Vista issue?

BTW, for those who have not used ESATA, let me tell you that the cable is as stiff as a curtain pole on viagra, and with the F3's ESATA port being on the right hand side of the lappie and close to the front it becomes virtually impossible for a right-handed person to use a mouse.

End of saga, and I hope the above helps someone who encounters the same issue. Don't we all love these little difficulties? Of course we do.