Why are my external USB HDDs always dying so fast? (Around 1 year or less!)

[DataT3RR0R]

Hi guys.

I had 2 external HDDs yet.
One was a iomega HDD 1TB which was honestly "cheap" so I didn't wonder that it was dead after like a year. But actually there was a Samsung HDD in it which lets me wonder why it died so fast.
The second was a Seagate Expansion Desktop 3TB.

Both died in around 1 year. Dying in the way of getting bad sectors, running slow, crashing frequently and you know the drill. Now I wonder, WHY?!

I have a Seagate Baracuda 1TB for like 5 years I think and it NEVER had any problems. Its health is even displayed as 100% (NOT KIDDING!). This was only used inside the PC over S-ATA. I had my system on it and now I use it as a temporary external HDD. I actually use this SATA/USB Transformator that came with the Seagate expansion desktop. Yes, I built them apart in case you wonder. Works fine, didnt had a single problem yet. But they are literally the same drives anyway. Just with 1TB or 3TB.

However, I am not planning to do this long since I dont trust this USB/SATA shit anymore.
Can it be that HDDs degrade faster over USB? And if so, why? I think I might have handled it wrong because I actually had those external HDDs running all the time. They booted with the PC and they shutdown with the PC. Also I never used this "Safely remove hardware" feature in Windows... Is this why this happens? I actually thought this feature is pure bullcrap of Windows but now I am not sure anymore. At least since the way how I was handling my external HDDs seemed to be wrong. Why else would they all die so fast.

Any ideas or thoughts on this? Whats your experiences? Is it my own fault they died so fast or are USB/SATA HDDs a bad idea in general?
I definitely think I will handle my external HDDs more careful from now on because I cant believe those 2 were just coincidence. Hell, I even started using this remove hardware safe dialogue, lol...
I dont wanna use this HDD too long over the USB/SATA transformer anyway. I feel like its not healthy for HDDs. Is that true?

 

[Colif]

Seagate drives in last two years haven't had a good name for reliability (I prefer not to think about given I have one), so there is that. I don't know a lot about Samsung hdd reliability, their ssd seem okay (once again, fingers crossed)

My experience with external drives isn't much different to your own, the two I have had just stopped working after a while. Its probably why I don't have one now, I use USB flash drives instead though the amount of data I have to back up isn't that great. MY last external hdd was a Western Digital and eventually it was slowing down my boot times, as it wasn't responding fast enough.

The safely remove thing is mostly to stop windows using device before its removed, to avoid corrupting files, it shouldn't create bad sectors on the drive I don't think. Both drives had their own power brick I assume, since i doubt USB supplies enough power to run a hdd

 

[DataT3RR0R]

USB does actually not have enough power for running HDDs. There is a extra electricity plug which uses electricity from a adapter that comes thraight outta a electricity socket. However, I think I read of external drives which actually ONLY use the USB power supply. No idea how that should work for the HDD but oh well...

I wanted to get a new HDD but I am not sure whether I should buy a external one or not. I will probably go with Western Digital this time though. Never had one and I read a lot of good stuff about them. I might consider buying a normal HDD and buying a extra SATA USB Adapter. Maybe they have higher quality than those cheap china ones prebuilt into external HDDs...

Nice to hear that I am not the only one noticing the high and fast failure rate of external HDDs...
USB stick/Flashdrive wouldnt work for me. I have several Terabytes of Data. ^^

 

[DavidVioMC]

External hardrives die twice faster as a internal drives, you can't do anything about it. Once I had a really old HP Pavilion p6-2440e with i3 which came out in 2012 (That PC was decent at the time) and as soon I bought it, I added 1TB external hardrive along with the 1Tb internal hardrive, the internal hardrive after 4 years, still works great, it wasen't formatted even once and never had any issues, not it's slow, currently has 900Gb stuff on it and boots up in less than 30 seconds when the external hardrive has been formatted about 7 times, barely had anything on it, and died in 2 years, and they're both the same hardrives, I don't remeber what the hardrives were.

 

[Colif]

Last PC had a 300gb hdd in it from western Digital that I got with PC, it lasted 9 years until I replaced PC. I have only had 1 internal drive die in last 10 years, and it was a 10k rpm drive and first gen of the design, the drive i replaced it with was also 10k rpm and lasted till i replaced PC

Meanwhile I had 2 1tb external drives in same time that were lucky to last 2 years each.

I would get an internal drive as its almost as safe for backups as an external and seem to last longer. If its storage, you can set win 10 to put it to sleep after 20 minutes at start up so I doubt my storage drive is ever awake, and will likely last longer because of it. The 9 year old 300gb drive i mentioned above was storage all its life, probably why it lasted as long as it did.