Can't write to external hard drive, kills MacBook Pro

I got a SimpleTech SimpleDrive 1TB for an external drive. It's formatted for PC but I was able to format it for Mac with no problem and read and write small files to/from it. But data that is larger than 80-90MB will not work—at that point the progress bar ceases and will not close. I can force-quit Finder but Finder will not reboot and at that point I can only kill the power. The Finder has also hung when opening a folder on this drive. After reboot the drive does not mount and I have to turn its power off and on for it to appear.
I did try to zero out the drive but aborted that after 3 hours. I figured that would have zeroed out anything on the drive but it changed nothing. What should I try next?
Jeremy

Yes, I formatted it as OS Extended (Journaled).
Overnight I let Disk Utility run and zero out the entire drive. It took 10 hours and at the end it then prepared to erase but had another error: Input/Output Error. It now appears the drive has reverted to the factory defaults (MS-DOS (FAT) format, Master Boot Record) and is unusable. I am going to return it.
Jeremy

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We have a 300gb Maxtor external hard drive. I had set it up using the Windows laptop I use for work.
The Mini that we have can read, but not write to, this external drive. I just went back and set the Security properties to allow Full Control for the Everyone group. That did not work; the drive is still read-only for the Mini.
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We have a 300gb Maxtor external hard drive. I had set
it up using the Windows laptop I use for work.
The Mini that we have can read, but not write to,
this external drive. I just went back and set the
Security properties to allow Full Control for the
Everyone group. That did not work; the drive is still
read-only for the Mini.
Sounds like the drive is formatted in NTFS. Under OSX, your Mac will be able to read, but not write, to an NTFS formatted drive.
If you format as HFS or HFS+, the Mac will be able to readd/write to the disk, but the Windows box will not be able to recognize the disk.
Since it is a 300gb drive, FAT will not work (FAT does not recognize drives that large).
It must be formatted as FAT32.
It can be formatted as such on either the windows box or the Mac.
You can partition the disk, one HFS+, one FAT32, but the windows box still will not be able to recognize the HFS partition, and the Mac will be able to read/write both.
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Jotsy wrote:
Does anybody have any ideas on how to deal with this?
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Jotsy wrote:
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Can't write to external hard drive, kills MacBook Pro

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