External Hard Drive Unavailable After Each Restart

Hi, everyone —
I recently upgraded from a 2007 iMac to a 2012 iMac with a Fusion drive. I had two external drives on the old machine which are now connected to the new machine. Both are Seagate "Backup Desk" drives (2TB "Media" and 3TB "Time Machine") and are connected via USB.
Whenever I restart the computer (or shutdown and turn back on), the Time Machine disk connects fine, but the Media one does not. Disk Utility does not even see the missing hardware, let alone mount the volume.
To make it appear, all I need to do is disconnect and reconnect the drive.
But it's annoying! And with my iPhoto library on the ext drive, i have to reselect my background images every time I restart.
Any ideas?
I've done the following things in the last day, without any improvement:
- shut down, unplugged for 15 seconds, restarted zapping pram
- ran "Repair Disk" on all three disks and Repair Disk Permissions on boot volume. No errors.
- tried a different USB outlet on the iMac
Note that despite repeated testing finding no issues, it's possible the drive my have errant sectors. I've seen i/o errors in the Console, but ran Repair Disk several times without major errors. And since the issue started when I connected it to the new machine, I'm skeptical that this particular issue is hardware-related.
Never seen this kind of thing before – any other ideas? Thanks in advance for any help.

I've seen i/o errors in the Console
That's proof of a malfunctioning drive.

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