2 Corrupted NTFS External Drives In 1 Week

[rcappo]

Am I just unlucky, or is there something else going on?

I had one drive that had one folder disappear in Mac OS X, and Disk Utility said that there was a problem. I plugged it into a Windows computer and ran CHKDSK and it recovered the files it could (most of them actually).

I then plugged it back into my Macbook, along with my Backup external hard drive to make sure all of the files were up to date and transfer some. Now, this backup hard drive has only been plugged in 5 times in the past 2 years, and has had the best of conditions. Yet now the entire backup drive is unmountable. I will say that it did throw an error during the copying of one file that may or may not have been bad on the first drive, or maybe it died right in the middle of transferring the file...

Should I trust these two hard drives anymore? The first one was making some weird noise very infrequently a few weeks before it had it's problem. The 2nd backup one is like it is right out of the box. WD says that they have a two year warranty on them, but is it more hassle than it would be worth?

I did buy a new USB3 hard drive on Black Friday before any of this happened, and I will have to think about what to do with it now. Do I format it as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive? Are there any benefits to that since I now only use Windows to run CHKDSK? Should I buy a second one and setup a RAID array? $100 is cheap insurance compared to having to deal with this.

 

[chscag]

Am I just unlucky, or is there something else going on?

I had one drive that had one folder disappear in Mac OS X, and Disk Utility said that there was a problem. I plugged it into a Windows computer and ran CHKDSK and it recovered the files it could (most of them actually).

I then plugged it back into my Macbook, along with my Backup external hard drive to make sure all of the files were up to date and transfer some. Now, this backup hard drive has only been plugged in 5 times in the past 2 years, and has had the best of conditions. Yet now the entire backup drive is unmountable. I will say that it did throw an error during the copying of one file that may or may not have been bad on the first drive, or maybe it died right in the middle of transferring the file...

Should I trust these two hard drives anymore? The first one was making some weird noise very infrequently a few weeks before it had it's problem. The 2nd backup one is like it is right out of the box. WD says that they have a two year warranty on them, but is it more hassle than it would be worth?

I did buy a new USB3 hard drive on Black Friday before any of this happened, and I will have to think about what to do with it now. Do I format it as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive? Are there any benefits to that since I now only use Windows to run CHKDSK? Should I buy a second one and setup a RAID array? $100 is cheap insurance compared to having to deal with this.

You didn't mention if you were using a driver in order to write to the NTFS drives from OS X. Paragon NTFS is the only driver that works well. Tuxera and NTFS 3G are known to cause corruption to NTFS drives so if that's what you're using, be aware. If not, disregard.

 

[HDFan]

I wouldn't blame the hardware at this point. There are major issues with El Capitan's Disk Manager and mounting. I have a drive partitioned into Paragon NTFS volumes. Sometimes they show when I boot, sometimes they don't. I don't remember them ever showing up in Disk Manager after connecting the drive. Working the issue with both Paragon and Apple.

Larry Jordan has written that the signals on magnetic disks need to be refreshed periodically. If the disk stays on this process is automatic. If the disk remains in storage the signals will disappear over time. You need to start worrying once a disk hasn't been used for a year or so. Since you've used the disk over the last two years that's not an issue but thought that I would mention it.

 

[rcappo]

I do use NTFS 3G, and have for the past 4.5 years. I'm not saying that it might not be a problem now, but I wouldn't think it would have done this to both so close together. Unless it was a bad file that was able to corrupt both drives. It is a hassle getting NTFS 3G to work in the first place, and it could be the hacked USB3 driver I am using that Apple doesn't approve of that might be the culprit. I am still using Yosemite, since I want to make sure Apple has fixed the bugs and the 3rd party applications have been tested to work thoroughly.

Thanks for the tip on turning on the drive. I do backups a few times a year, but I have some drives that haven't been plugged in for a long time that I probably should check.

I will have to reboot to see if that fixes the mounting problem, or if it will take another CHKDSK.

 

[glenthompson]

If you only use a drive on OS X then it should be formatted as Mac OS X Extended, Journaled. If you need to move data between OS X and Windows then FAT32 is the best bet. If you need a robust, flexible drive on Windows then use NTFS.

 

[HDFan]

If your problem is an NTFS drive won't mount, are you running Parallels? I have a drive with 2 NTF partitions which only randomly mounted, but only on boot. After the latest Parallels update which fixes a problem where NTFS volumes won't mount the drives mounted immediately even after booting.