Problems reconnecting to NAS (Iomega StorCenter ix2) after sleep

I have a 2TB Iomega StorCenter ix2 on my home network (wired ethernet) which is set up and generally working fine. My iMac running OS X 10.6.8 connects with it normally upon start-up, and for the most part stays connected even after waking up from sleep. However, maybe 25% of the time the Mac wakes up from sleep, it has a connection problem with the ix2. In the finder, it still shows it mounted, but when I try to click on it and open a folder, the finder says "Connecting" and it just hangs up. Also, in the instances when this happens, any other program that relies on the ix2, like iTunes which uses it for the music library, or Time Machine which uses it for backups, will hang up indefinitely. At that point, I usually have to hard restart the computer, and then it re-mounts the ix2 with no problem.

Any thoughts on what might be causing this problem and how I might avoid it? Alternately, if it's unavoidable a certain percentage of the time, is there any more graceful way to force a re-mount without having to restart the machine?

Thanks.