Portable USB drive that can withstand accidental disconnection

[tmhard]

I'm shopping around for a new external 1Tb portable drive that is USB 2.0 compatible. Obviously I would like it to be "hardy".

One thing I accidentally did with a previous drive was to disconnect it while it was still spinning/mounted. This rendered the drive unmountable. You could hear the disk head constantly trying to access somewhere on the disk but failing each time.

The only consolation was that it was just a back up disk. However, I now have an expensive drive that does nothing!

Are there any online reviews that test drives for such an accidental occurrence? I just want a drive that still survives if it is disconnected while it is still spinning. To be honest, considering the way such drives are connected up to the PC, I'm a little surprised I've not heard of more stories where the USB cable was knocked out, for example.

I would like to avoid SSD drives because they're expensive for 1Tb.

 

[thx1138v2]

I'm kind of surprised hot unplugging your drive damaged it sine USB ports are mostly hot pluggable. You might want to try it on another machine. I guess if it's USB 2.0 it might be somewhat dated but still it seems like a drive shouldn't die from an unexpected power outage. Your electricity could go out at any time. UPS helps the entire box but things inside the box like overload, failing PSU, or overheating can cause a shutdown also.

Here are a couple of sites you might explore for a solution.
hardware secrets
Ars Technica

There is another reason you don't want an SSD for a backup drive in this situation:
the-mysteriously-disappearing-ssd-drive
That article is becoming dated now and I assume the manufacturers are addressing it but better safe than sorry.

 

[thx1138v2]

I had another thought about your problem: it may just be the USB interface to the drive that got trashed. Remove the drive from the case. The drive might still work if you can attach it internally to your computer or install it in another external case.

 

[tmhard]

I thought I would hunt down the problematic hard drive and check a few things with it since it's been a long time that I have connected it up.

It can be mounted in my Linux OS. However, on doing a bad block/cluster check, it found 450 bad blocks/clusters out of 60546968. Though it is a small percentage, really hard disks should have no bad blocks/clusters nowadays (or they're hidden by the on disk firmware?).

Trying to think back to when the problems started, I think I was doing a back up to the disk and it was being written to at the time.

I went through your links and could not find any reviews in there that did tests for being unplugged during reading and writing.

I really don't want my hard disk to get damaged internally in this way!

 

[tmhard]

Ping (sort of)...

So, anybody knows of a USB 2.0 compatible drive that doesn't get damaged blocks/sectors when it is disconnected while reading/writing?

First hand experience of such a drive would be very welcomed, but indirect knowledge (e.g. from reviews) would be welcomed as well!

Pointer to a review that tests this as part of the reviewing process would be good too.