Corrupted external hard drive

I brought a brand new G-tech harddrive last spring. It worked perfectly for the first few months with Premeire. I was taking a photo class and had to format it with Lightroom - since the first day I used it with LR it has been crashing and often becomes unresponsive to a point where I can't open any of its files. I find it weird that you seem to have a similiar experience. Have you by any chance solved the issue?

I have been experiencing this issue multiple times in the past 3 weeks. I am using the latest LR and MacOS. 

The drives are all various WD Passports of differing ages. 

I was working on images in lightroom, got the "Loading" message, image never loaded. Restarted LR. Restarted computer. Switched cables. Nothing. Then go to do first aid on the hard drive and couldn't. Was told by Disk Utility that it couldn't do anything and I should back up the drive. Then went through several days working in terminal using rsync to retrieve any uncorrupted data (later got Disk Warrior and fixed the drive).

Bought a new hard drive and had the same issue happen. That hard drive was APFS (the other was MacOs Journaled). So this new hard drive I was unable to use Disk Warrior on. But I was able to rsync my data to another hard drive.

And now I have a newer new hard drive and I'm already experiencing issues with it.

Not sure how to even approach troubleshooting. I'm doing the same processes I've been doing with the same line of hard drives I've been using for 10+ years. The only common issue is that it's happening while using lightroom.

Did you resolve this? I've worked as a photographer for 12 years and never had a hard drive corrupt, but have had SIX corrupted over the past year. It always seems to be when photoshop or Lightroom are open. I've tried troubleshooting (wiped computer, replaced computer, tried different hard drives, different cables) and have not been able to fix this. 

I have also been editing for years with images on external volumes, with no problems even now. But I have also seen images corrupted by hardware; as the others are guessing it was a hardware problem, specifically a card reader. Switching card readers let the images transfer with no errors.

So in this case I would try trial and error with the components in the data chain, starting with switching cables if you haven’t done that already. If  the interface at the PC is a removable card (e.g. USB 3 card), test with a different port not on that card, if available.

Another thing to look at is power. Hardware problems and data corruption are less likely if the equipment is plugged into something that protects it from damaging voltage fluctuations and other power problems, like a good UPS with voltage regulation.

Lightroom Classic probably reads/writes to storage by calling standard OS commands for data transfer, like any other program. The transfer is then handled by the storage device driver software. That’s why it’s not common for an application to corrupt data on its own. When this type of application has a legitimate data corruption bug with external storage, it would probably be noticed by a large number of users and reported widely, but that hasn’t happened.

I would suspect this is some other hardware issue ratheer than a problem with Lightroom. I have had two external hard drives connected to my computer for years and have never encountered an issue with either one of them. I'm using Windows 10 and LrC 10.2.

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@jonspencer wrote:

I've now had two G Tech external drives rendered unmountable and data lost in the last couple of weeks ... I put the first one down to an error with the drive, but now I'm wondering if the issue is with LR or Windows.

 

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Can't comment on Windows, but it's very unlikely it is Lightroom doing this. 

I was a big fan of G Tech in the past but no longer; I've had some issues on the Mac and wonder if that points to their lack of QC. 

Software cannot corrupt a hard drive. Hardware malfunctions can corrupt a hard drive. This is not a Lightroom Classic statement, it is how computers operate, and thus applies to ALL software.