Is my external hard drive dying? It sometimes doesn't mount, and sometimes it's empty...

[baryon]

I have a 2TB Samsung HD204UI SATA hard drive docked into a USB 3.0 Sharkoon Speedport Duo that I use to backup another external hard drive from time to time. I'm using it on a 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro and El Capitan 10.11.3.

Here are the symptoms:

• Sometimes it will take longer than other disks to appear on the desktop when I mount it (often a minute or so)
• There is a "DamagedFiles" folder on it with two ".DSstore" files on it (probably some normally-hidden Finder files)
• Even if it does mount properly, sometimes it appears as if there was nothing on it (0 items)
• Sometimes applications complain about not being able to write to it

However:

• Running First Aid in the new Disk Utility says everything's fine
• Most of the time, everything is fine even if it takes a bit longer to mount

So, I'd guess these are symptoms of a failing hard drive (It's just a backup so if it does fail I don't lose anything important). But before I get a new one, I want to make sure this is really the issue and not something else.

Could it possibly be the dock behaving strangely? Should I try reformatting it? Or should I just not take risks and steer clear of this drive and get a new one?

 

[Fishrrman]

I'd get all the important data backed up to another drive.

Then, I'd re-initialize the problem Samsung drive.

Then, I'd use the "repair disk" function in Disk Utility on the drive.

Run it 5 times in succession.

Do you get "a good report" each and every time?

If so, I'd trust the drive again. At least for "non-critical" storage...

 

[JohnDS]

Is there any possibility the problem is the Sharkoon? Can you attach the drive through a different interface?

 

[baryon]

Is there any possibility the problem is the Sharkoon? Can you attach the drive through a different interface?

It's possible, I could try with a USB 2.0 interface and see if that helps!

But all the other disks I use with the Sharkoon are totally fine (an old 500GB WD and a new 2TB WD), the only weird thing is that if I want to have both 2TB disks in it, it will only work with the WD on Bay 2 and the Samsung on Bay 1, and if it's the other way around, all the blue lights go out and none of the disks show up... I think that's a weird limitation of the Sharkoon.