External drive crashing windows explorer

My PC recognises the WD Passport Essential drive, however when copying files been the hard-drive and the external drive the transfer process and windows explorer keeps freezing and does not unlock. I have tried this with large and small files with no difference. I have a 55GB WD external drve (19 months old - FAT32 format) which works fine, however this new WD drive (320GB - NTFS format) keeps freezing windows explorer as I have described. I would be grateful for some advice.

I am having the exact same problem, no solution, except go back to my old WD drive!