What could be the cause of repeated failures of my external storage drives?
I have used three different external storage drives in the last two years: a WD 4TB HDD, a Seagate 4TB HDD, and a Crucial USB C 4TB SSD. All of them stopped working within a few months, exhibiting similar symptoms such as:
Not displaying any storage information in Windows Explorer
Crashing Windows Explorer when trying to access the drive
Causing disk write errors and launch failures for Steam games
Freezing the whole PC in some cases (for the HDDs)
I
expected the SSD to be more durable than the HDDs, but it started showing these symptoms sooner than the HDDs. I also switched to a different computer with the SSD, but the problem persisted. I wonder if there is something wrong with my external drives, or if I am just extremely unlucky. I would like to know the possible reasons for these failures, and how to prevent them in the future.
https://technsight.com/