External hard drive constantly dropping USB connection

Last week I bought a 1 TB drive from Hitachi to use for video storage and rendering, but it seems that every 15 minutes or so, the USB connection drops itself and then immediately reconnects. This of course proves to be a problem when it happens while I'm transferring data. I've had a number of uploads fail because of this and I don't want to start editing several hours of HDV video in FCP only to have the connection constantly dropped.
Any thoughts/suggestions?
Thanks.

I've recently started having similar problems with my external USB devices - including a 500GB Western Digital External USB drive. But it's not just the drive. I have a USB hub plugged into the left USB port and the whole thing was switching on and off - turning off my mouse, disconnecting my USB drive and restarting my iPhone charging (and restarting iPhoto every time, of course, to download any new photos).
Initially I suspected the USB hub (which has it's own power supply) had gone bad somehow but after reading about all the problems MacBook Pro owners have been having with their USB devices I'm not so sure anymore.
Trying the right USB port now to see if it exhibits the same problems. So far it's working fine with just the drive plugged in. I'll let you know.

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