How old is the drive? If it’s not too old you could try sending it back. But you can buy an internal IDE drive for under $100 these days.
If you don’t need it to be portable, the only real advantage of external drives are you only start’em up when you need them. So that saves some wear and tear on the drives. IDE drive will start everytime you start your pc. Most of the damage/wear is done to a drive when the spin up or down.
I usually get drives from zipzoomfly.com they have decent prices and I’ve never had a problem with them.
good luck
Scott Cumbo
Editor
Broadway Video, NYC