Why I'm done with portable hard drives

Probably the OS

I think it has more to do with the OS than the physical characteristics of the drive. I'm using a WD passport on Linux with absolutely no issues.

portable hard drives

I have two WD portable hard drives (about the size of a deck of cards) that I drag back and forth from work and whenever I travel, as well as two larger models that I use at work and with my desktop at home. I've had the small portable hard drives for 1 year, and the two larger portables for 2 years, and have never had a problem (the larger ones aren't moved much). I did have a Maxtor that crashed 6 months after I got it, so I've stopped using them. I only keep my work files on these drives, not any program files, and use a program called GoodSync to periodically back-up files that I've worked on at home or at the office. Because this program is so easy to use, and asks me which direction I want to copy the file in when both files have been modified, I have all of my data backed-up on these 4 portable drives, as well as my desktop hard drive at home. My files are far to big to move around easily on flash drives and sometimes, when I get home, I find that I need to use another file that I'd worked on earlier. With GoodSync, everything is backed-up at the end of work on one of my portable drives to take home with me. I couldn't live without 'em.

"My questions are: 1) do

"My questions are: 1) do portable USB drives fail at far higher rates than internal drives?; 2) If so, why?; and 3) Are USB drive failures radically under-reported in the industry?"

1) Yes!
2) They are portable - and are knocked around. NEVER move a spinning drive.
3) No more so than internal drives - but those are radically under-reported also.

Before going to a forensic recover house - try Spinrite on the seemingly-dead drive. It's worked on three drives for me and is a LOT cheaper than darta-recovery houses.

USB flash drives

I had several usb drives of different sizes and names and they all suddenly died.
It is not worthy to spend any money on those suckers, if we all boicott buying it the manufacturers will do a better job in the future.

Actually, it's probably registry issues

Hard drives do fail. But if you have that kind of history, something else is going on.

Certain types of power users (testers) plug a lot of stuff into their computers in very unpredictable ways. It should just work. But the key word is should.

Bring up your OS's version of Device Manager with all of your removables removed; "show" the hidden devices; and delete all the USB storage devices (assuming you only have ones which use the native usbstor driver). As you plug each device back in, they will have to be "re-installed" with the native drivers (BTW I typically ignore the requests to reboot).

Good luck

That'll be magic.

I have lost 3 in one year.

I have lost 3 in one year. All of them manufactured by Seagate. Two of them were internal IDE drives that I installed in an external USB enclosure and the 3rd one was a Free Agent 500G. All of these drives were brand new, so none of them lasted 12 months of use.

BTW, the other 2 were 300 or 320G drives.

EVERY single one

It's not just you. EVERY single external hard drive I have owned has failed with very little or no warning. Here the WD one that just failed had warning messages dating back three days ago; but, of course, I would have never known about those if I didn't look in the log since Windows didn't bother to tell me. Well, as for me, the first indication of a problem was when most of the programs had running problems, and the reason was that it was using the defective drive as a recycling dumping ground for other drives even though I didn't set it up to do that. I only found out about the failure during a Windows Update when it was trying to use the volume in this fashion; but, instead of recycling a file, it recycled itself. By then there was only one directory I could recover; and, I should have recovered it, but I wanted to see if there was anything else I could do. Apparently, there wasn't.

In addition to the Western Digital external drive, I've had two Maxtors (actually three, one was replaced during warranty) and they all failed. All four hard drives failed with the EXACT same error code: S.M.A.R.T. ID 5. I did not abuse any of them. Just do yourself a favor and avoid external hard drives. It's time to let these cheapskates know that people aren't going to tolerate this crap any longer.

Done with portable hard drives

I had one die on me. When I opened the case I found that the cable socket had broken a solder joint. As it was out of warrenty I just took the HD itself out and put in an adaptec case ($35?) and it's been running fine for the last nearly 2 years now. They don't like rough handling apparently. I just bought another, larger portable . . . much easier than replacing the hd in my laptop.