Airport Disk starts and then turns off

We see this problem occasionally and I have no idea why. I will get up in the morning and even though the Extreme is on, the USB disk that is attached is now off. I then push the button on the drive (a WD 500GB MyBook) and it starts to spin up and then shuts itself down again after a few seconds. It never mounts or anything anywhere.
Now if I take that same USB disk connected locally through USB, then everything is fine. Usually an Airport Extreme reboot fixes this, but it is annoying in general. Is there anyway to fix this?
Thanks

I know my Mac is old, but it works just fine. It's just that even though the battery is full, and all the indicators tell me it is, if the power cord happens to fall off (it's the magnetic one), the whole Mac dies suddenly, doesn't save anything that's open at the time and requires a hard boot to get going again, and only if the cord is plugged. I'm assuming my battery is old anyway, as before this started, it hadn't held the charge for more than an hour. Am I better off replacing the entire machine or replacing the battery and cord and hope that works?

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