Strange external HD behaviors

This isn't really about Gateway products, but I had three external hard
drives die within a few days of each other a few months ago and since they
were attached to my Gateway computers, I figure this was as good a place as
any to post. The three drives--two Maxtors and one Western Digital simply
stopped being recognized by any of the machines. No amount of switching them
around or anything I did had any effect. I have two XP's and one Vista
machine--all Gateway. There had been numerous Windows updates for both XP
and Vista when the drives stopped working. Today I bought a new Western
Digital 500 GB external drive and hooked it up. Since I hadn't thrown the
other drives away, I hooked one of them up just to see what happened--it
worked fine. I dug out the other two and those also work and all data is
still intact. Did anyone else have any kind of bizarre stuff happen with
any external drives?

Is there any chance that all the updates played havoc with the drives and
then further updates fixed the initial problems? Anyone?