sleeping firewire drives - any solution (windows)

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i have a firewire external harddrive (brand name - can't remember which one at the moment) and it goes to sleep sometimes after being inactive or even if i'm copying lots of data (to/from) the drive sometimes can lose its connection.
is there anyway (on windows) to stop this?

when it happens, i have to restart the firewire drive to get new connection.

could this be IRQ related? eg IRQ sharing - one signal causes the other share device to fail/stop?

any suggestions are welcome. i've seen some other people report sleeping firewire drives too.