USB External hard-drive loses connection durring operation

The problem

I have had a rather strange problem with my external hard drive, namely:

2TB Seagate Desktop External USB 3.0 (model: SRD00F2)

• As strange as it may be, the drive seems to disconnect itself in the middle of something.
• On a computer start-up it takes uncomfortably long time to detect the drive, then ignore it for the start-up as it’s not a system drive and carry on with the normal boot-up process.
• At times, the drive makes ‘chirping’ or ‘cricket’ sound.
• At other times, the drive disappears from the list of available discs or volumes in my system, whilst copying files.
• Copying files go with a decent speed, even up to about 100MB/s, but suddenly it slows down to a few hundreds of kB/s. Then either it takes a long time or stops altogether with an error message.

What I have checked:

• I have checked the cables and they are not damaged
• The cables are original from manufacturer as designed for this device
• A hard-drives sometimes switch-off themselves when they get overheated, so make sure you don’t stack one on top of another one. Sometimes instead laying them flat on a table stand them on a side. It allows a better air circulation and heat removal.
  
• I have switched off the power saving options, so my hard-drive, neither USB-hub are getting switched off by an operating system at a random time when OS feels like it.
• It is a good idea to move your USB drives further on the list of boot-up devices at the BIOS settings. This way your external drives will be ignored during the system start-up, saving you some time.
• Scanning for bad-sectors has revealed that on the drive there are many bad-sectors.

Why bad-sectors occurs on USB external hard-drives in the first place ?

To my understanding, the most of the bad-sectors on USB external hard-drives occurs because of unexpected disconnecting, loose or faulty cables (a USB-data or a power supply) whilst a drive is being used.

Cutting-off a power supply can cause a physical damage, either to the magnetic surface of discs inside your drive chassis or to a drive’s electronics.

Sudden disconnecting of a USB-data-cable may cause corruption of your data or other inconsistencies in a file system database.

The solution

NOTE: When your computer gathers a lot of dust on its heat-sink attached on its processor it can suddenly switch-off itself, in a similar way like it would when you have a power supply outage. Watch out weather your processor gets overheated. To monitor the temperature of your CPU use the CoreTemp software http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

WATCH OUT for an unwanted software that might be bundled with this software.
Go to either a 64bit version Mega or a 32bit version. Mega

During normal operation, the processor’s core temperature suppose to always be bellow 80-85ºC. If it goes above you should start to worry and find a solution rather quickly before your computer starts to switch-off itself or, even worse, the processor starts to burn or melt – like it used to be the case with AMD K6 processors a few years ago.

As long as you don’t mind using a slightly smaller capacity drive, a portable external USB-hard-drive might be a good solution for you. These things, usually don’t require external power supply, because they are powered directly from a USB socket of a computer. This way, as long as your computer has it’s power, it can power your USB-hard-drive too.

When you prefer hard drives with a little bit bigger capacity, you will need to use those with external power supply. It has its benefits of a big capacity and risks of unpleasant side effects when sudden power outage occurs.

We all know we should always close all files before disconnecting a drive. MS Windows systems are rather messy and not always allow clean disconnection and/or closing all files, even if you use ‘eject’ option because MS Windows keep some files still open in the background. Instead of standard MS Windows way of ‘ejecting’ USB-drives, you can use a handy piece of software that allows to force-close all files on any USB drive. The program even allows to disconnects the drive it was started from http://quickandeasysoftware.net/software/usb-disk-ejector. Mega