Brand new hard drive not mounting, giving errors

[baryon]

I had an old Samsung 2TB drive that I used for backup (not Time Machine but an app called Backup Buddy). It kept taking ages to mount, with high activity for the fsck_hfs process. Disk Utility would not launch until the fsck_hfs process had finished doing whatever it was doing.

I use a Sharkoon QuickPort Duo USB 3.0 dock to mount my hard drives, usually without issues. However, the issue also occurred once or twice when using an old USB 2.0 enclosure with the same Samsung drive, on another Mac.

I figured the drive was old and failing, so I bought a new one.

The new one is a 3TB Western Digital Blue drive. I set it up as HFS+ Journaled and use it for Time Machine to backup both a 2TB WD MyPassport USB 3.0 drive and my 500 GB Mac SSD.

It ran fine for 2 weeks and now it's doing the same thing as the previous drive: not mounting, and high activity on the fsck_hfs process. When it does mount, everything looks fine on the drive, but I get this error:

"macOS can't repair the disk, bla bla bla"

If I plug the disk back in and force quit the fsck_hfs process, then I get the above error and the disk instantly mounts fine, without apparent issues. I can access the disk just fine. If I then go to Disk Utility and run First Aid, I get this:

Repairing file system.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Bad hard link creation date
(It should be 3564391143 instead of 3514036344)
Bad hard link creation date
(It should be 3564391143 instead of 3514036344)
Bad hard link creation date
(It should be 3564391143 instead of 3514036344)
Bad hard link creation date
(It should be 3564391143 instead of 3514036344)
Bad hard link creation date
(It should be 3564391143 instead of 3514036344)
Incorrect number of thread records
Incorrect number of thread records
Invalid leaf record count
(It should be 9663477 instead of 9663487)
Checking multi-linked files.
Incorrect number of file hard links
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 4325272 instead of 4325287)
Checking extended attributes file.
Incorrect number of extended attributes
(It should be 2848314 instead of 2848324)
Incorrect number of Access Control Lists
(It should be 2848261 instead of 2848271)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 1509030, /HFS+ Private Data/iNode1509030)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240958)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240961)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240964)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240967)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240970)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240976)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240981)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240984)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240987)
Overlapped extent allocation (id = 7240991)
Checking multi-linked directories.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 83109157 instead of 117207667)
Volume header needs minor repair
Repairing volume.
Orphaned file hard link (id = 8206354)
Orphaned file hard link (id = 8206358)
Orphaned file hard link (id = 8206362)
Orphaned file hard link (id = 8206369)
Orphaned file hard link (id = 8206386)
The volume Backup 3TB could not be repaired.
File system check exit code is 8.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
File system verify or repair failed.
Operation failed…

Keep in mind that this is a brand new disk that was only turned on for a few hours since I bought it, and that the same exact issue happened to a totally different disk (which is the entire reason I bought a new one).

My other disks have never done this (another newish WD 2TB Green drive, an old WD 500 GB Green drive, and a 3TB WD MyPassport).

I'm stumped. Why are two of my hard drives acting like this, one brand new, regardless of what computer I use them on an what enclosure I mount them in?

Sure I can do what it says and format this drive and spend another 2 days setting it up. But I bet it will fail again soon. I highly doubt this brand new drive has hardware issues. There's something wrong somewhere else and I have no idea where.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

You might try creating a backup using a different backup app.

Have you tried CarbonCopyCloner?
CCC is FREE to download and try (fully functional) for 30 days.

SuperDuper is FREE to download and will let you do a "full clone" forever (without registering).

 

[bartvk]

I wonder if the USB receptacle of the Macbook may be faulty.

 

[baryon]

You might try creating a backup using a different backup app.

Have you tried CarbonCopyCloner?
CCC is FREE to download and try (fully functional) for 30 days.

SuperDuper is FREE to download and will let you do a "full clone" forever (without registering).

But I've had this issue with two separate backup apps: BackupBuddy and Time Machine, which would suggest that it's unrelated to the backup app I'm using, wouldn't it?
[doublepost=1483204238][/doublepost]

I wonder if the USB receptacle of the Macbook may be faulty.

The dock holds two hard drives at once, and out of the 5 drives I use with it, only two have this issue (and before the new drive started screwing up, only the Samsung drive kept doing it over and over again for a year or so). If it was the USB, then all the drives connected through this USB port, and therefore through this dock, should have issues. It wouldn't always be the same drives, I guess... Though this would be easy to test, I'd just have to plug it into the other USB port and see if that fixes it.