Firewire drive disconnects

I am having an intermittent problem with my aluminum iMac (Mid 2007/24"/2.8 GHz). I have an external drive that I use for Time Machine backups (Hitachi Deskstar 500 GB Serial ATAII in a Firewire 800 SATA hard drive enclosure (Part # SS-M120). The problem I see is that sometimes when the computer goes to sleep, the drive isn't mounted when the system wakes up. When I hit a key (usually in the morning), the drive will spin while I log in, but it doesn't appear on the desktop, and I get the "Device removal" warning dialog box. This has happened using both FW400 and 800, and on system software from 10.4.11 to 10.5.4, and seems to be happening more often. I tried putting the drive on another iMac for a while, but no problems were seen. Any ideas as to what the problem could be?
Thanks in advance.

Excellent. This isn't an isolated problem. I'm assuming that there are few people out there that are doing work that stresses the I/O as we are doing, so it's not a well-known issue.
I think I discovered the cause of the problem last night:
My FW400 drive has valuable project data on it, so I left it off. I transfered my current video project to a USB drive to do my Final Cut work from (ugh) USB. First, I went into FC to make sure the project was still fine on the FW800 drive. What I'd forgotten was that the 003 (also FW400) was still powered down. Out of curiousity, I imported a large .MOV and did a render. After 5 minutes, no disconnect. So I waited and came back 30 minutes later.
The render was done, and no disconnects. I inspected things to see what was different and discovered that the 003 was off....meaning ALL FW 400 devices were powered down.
I then did the reverse; I shut down the FW800 drive, and began using Pro Tools and the FW400 drive. Everything worked fine.
Problem: FW400 and FW800 cannot be active simultaneously. Turn off ALL FW400 or all FW800 devices. Is the problem solved?
To me, this is a minor configuration problem. I can live with it. However, Apple needs to recognize and address it.
I've been working in FC for almost 4 hrs now, no problems.

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