Is an external hard drive (USB) dependent on RAM?

After a bad experience with another external USB drive, I have replaced it with a new Iomega eGo 320 drive. I don't have a lot of RAM on my G4 (768).
Overall, the new drive is great, but even though it is a portable drive, and meant to be plugged and unplugged, I tend to leave it attached for long periods of time. When the drive has been inactive, I notice that when I try to access it, I get the dreaded "spinning beachball of death" and can NOT get out of it. I have waited as long as 30 minutes, and it just never stops.
Does a larger capacity drive depend on the amount of RAM a cpu has when accessing the drive? Or is something else going on?
One thing I have done is to turn off "allowing hard drive(s) to go to sleep" in my energy saver preferences, but I have not had the drive plugged in since I did that, so I don't yet know if that will solve my problem.
Any thoughts as to why my drive is "hanging"?

Hi-
The spinning beachball would be normal, to the extent that the drive, if spun down, requires a bit of time to spin up again. This, however, is a matter of a few seconds (or should be).
Does a larger capacity drive depend on the amount of RAM a cpu has when accessing the drive? Or is something else going on?
I would consider this to be a possible problem of the external housing hard drive controller and OS X, or the chipset of the USB controller in the external housing and OS X.
The amount of RAM (yours is adequate), or the CPU speed would not have any bearing on the failure of the drive to return to an active state.
One thing I have done is to turn off "allowing hard drive(s) to go to sleep" in my energy saver preferences, but I have not had the drive plugged in since I did that, so I don't yet know if that will solve my problem.
This should keep the drive spinning, so it should respond quickly.
Generally speaking, external drives, should be firewire connected, rather than USB. If using a USB external drive, do not daisy chain the drive- always give it it's own USB port.
Other potential sources of trouble can come from using external drive "solutions" like the Iomega, the WD My Book, etc. The majority of these drive sets are aimed a PC users, with onboard controllers that are more often associated with Windows compatibility rather than Mac OS X. A sure sign of the "target market" is the default FAT32 format.......
I would keep an eye on the drive. I don't think that the behavior that you are experiencing is normal, and it could be that the drive housing does have a problem. It may be worth an email to Iomega support to get their take on the problem.

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