Epson P-5000 - need mini usb drive - Help!

I purchased a Lacie 160Gb Rugged USB drive with AC adaptor to power it and formatted the whole drive to FAT32.

Well sometimes the Epson can access it and other times it can't for example inserting a CF card creates a back-up file and for safe keeping I want to copy it to the external drive and it processes it and sure enough the file is there.

So I delete it from both devices and do it again and the Epson says is cannot access the device, so I replug the usb cable and even power down the usb drive to no avail, so I power everything down and start from scratch and still the Epson can't see the device.

This is driving me nuts, does anyone out there know of a mini USB drive that works flawlessly with the Epson because it appears the Epson doesn't like the Lacie for some reason.

P.S the Lacie works fine with XP so its not the drive, and the Epson works fine if the USB is not used and the cable is good I tried 2 of those.

I would contact Epson. Pretty specific question you have. Hopefully they can help you.

I contacted Epson America and Canada and they refuse to tell me what external usb drive will work with the Epson P-5000, we all know the drives need to be formatted in FAT32 and they must be powered seperately.

I am so frustrated with Epson I am very close to returning my Epson P-5000 for refund.

WARNING - The Lacie 160 GB Rugged Drive formatted as FAT32 powered with a Lacie AC adaptor does not work consistenly with the Epson so I returned it.

I have been to 3 stores this morning to track down an external usb drive with ac adaptor with no luck, all units I found were usb powered units.

Epson video on their website brags about backing up your photos with the new usb port but yet provides no support as to what devices they tested!