External HDD freezes when trying to add files

Hi guys, sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find anything related to my problem.

I'm on Yosemite and have a 2 TB external hard drive that was formatted as NTFS and have been using Paragon NTFS to write to it.

One day, my hard drive just wouldn't let me put any more files onto it even though it showed around 700 GB available. it froze and gave me a -36 error. I tried repairing the drive(which was successful but didn't solve the problem), and using the "erase free space" option to clean up the drive, but that too froze. And by froze, I mean the progress bar it didn't move even overnight.

Thinking I had no other options left, I moved my files off the hard drive and formatted it to exFAT. I then proceeded to put my files back onto it, but then I was met with the same problem as before, only now it had 1.21TB free space available. I couldn't even put the same amount of files back on the drive, which means that the unusable free space is growing.

What could be the problem? Is it persisting ghost files? I hope it's not my hard drive failing.

ColdCase said:

Sounds like a hard drive or enclosure failing.

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I was afraid of that. Right now I'm doing a last ditch effort to save it by doing a low level format. Thanks for the reply. I'll update this post if it works or not for anyone interested.

Fishrrman said:

OP wrote above:
[[ I'm on Yosemite and have a 2 TB external hard drive that was formatted as NTFS and have been using Paragon NTFS to write to it. ]]

Is there any reason why you're not using the Mac format (HFS+, journaling enabled) on this drive?

I would suggest that before you give up on the drive, that you re-initialize it to HFS+ and try running it that way for a while...

Click to expand...

I was using this drive on a windows computer before, so I had some files already on it. So instead of reformatting it, I thought it would be better just to use that Paragon NTFS software. Might have been a bad idea since that may have contributed to the degradation of my drive.

An update on my low level format process; the Acronis True Image software I was using failed to write to sector around 1,530,000,000. After some google searches on others who've had the same error, it turns out their hard drive was indeed failing.

Since I have nothing more to lose, I'll try giving HFS+ a shot. Thanks for your help and suggestions guys.