External Hard Drive Detection?

I have an external hard drive 200gb, my notebook always has a hard time detecting it. Itfirst has to heat up to load then I plug it in with trial and error for it to load up. It is 80% filled up. Is there any programs that could speed up this process? To where I just plug and play? I have another harddrive and it doesn't have to warmup. Is there a really good program to dectect all hard drives? I am using Vista.