I have a SATA hard drive that is in an external enclosure

When put into a regular computer it works fine. In the USB enclosure it shuts down.

I'll usually plug it in once. It will make that click sound that hard drives make when they shut down. I take out the USB plug, and plug it in again. It works fine for usually about 10mins, then shuts down again.

From now on taking the USB out and putting it in again may let it work for another minute or so, but usually it will do the "click" sound and shut down again the moment it starts reading.

I'm pretty sure it's not overheating, it doesn't get that hot and i've been able to get it REALLY hot while it's in a regular computer.

I've tried holding it down really well, in case it's a problem with it not being properly secured, but that doesn't work either.

Anyone in here have any better or worse experiences with these kinds of external hard drives?
Anyone have any suggestions for my problem?

Is the sata enclosure self powered? Sounds to me like a power problem.

yea, it draws power from a separate power plug, not through USB

If not power, then what does it say in your log after you plug the drive in? Should be in /var/log/messages or in /var/log/dmesg or both.

Sounds that way to me too.

I'm betting on a powering problem.

I was searching for the same issue as you have.

I just bought a External USB SATA casing and put a 500Gb drive into it.
My plan was to use it as a combined portable storage, portable Ubuntu.

The problem I have is that in windows the drive functions perfectly, I can use it I had it connected for hours with no issue.

When I try to Install Ubuntu, it goes through the entire installation fine.
I then reboot and start booting up the drive, and it will freeze up on random, but the same thing happends everytime, the Harddrive indicator Light on the External Casing goes off, Well it is still spinning, but the Light on it indicates it has been shut down, then Ubuntu will hang. there is no way of getting it up and running again, If I power cycle the drive with the switch on the drive, the light will come back on, but Ubuntu is still frozen, unplug, replug does no difference, light stays off.
Only thing to do is to Power cycle Harddrive and Reset PC.

My drive is a combined USB2/Firewire800 drive.
And when I used it on My laptop with Kubuntu, it functioned fine for hours running on Firewire, I have no USB2 on that one.
Unfortunatly It can not boot from Firewire.

On my Desktop I have USB2, but the firewire is on soundcard and is therefore not available during boot.

I will try to install Ubuntu on the desktop PC and have it connected on USB2 while having Ubuntu running on another drive to see if I can reproduce your issue.

If it does the same it might be that there is a bug with External SATA drives on USB.

Will come back with my experience.
Regards.
Brian.