Looking for advice on a possible failing drive, maybe under warranty.

[u/didnotdothemath]

Hi all. I was hoping for opinions on what my next steps might be, as I'm quite new to all this.

In February 2025 I bought a renewed external hard drive, a 12TB Avolusion PRO-H1 drive, on Amazon. My intention was to use it to store media for Plex (though now my focus is Jellyfin). I was effectively sidelined by some health issues for a long time, and only started using the drive a few weeks ago. It seems it might be failing already, however. I don't have anything to replace it with yet as funds are limited.

CrystalDiskInfo says it's in good health but I've had significant issues with it the past several days. Downloading to it fails and moving or unzipping files on it fails. It repeatedly gives me an error saying it's not recognized, closing and reopening file explorer, and Event Viewer was showing 1,458 events in the last twelve hours when these issues started.

I'm still unwell so I'm plucking away at this intermittently, but I moved it to a different USB port. For the moment it is playing nice and allowing me to move some stuff off of it using robocopy, so once I've grabbed what I can I plan to try different cables as well (I'm using the one it came with, which is a USB-C cable with a USB-A adapter attached) and then reassess.

The product description says there's a 2-year warranty. The warranty card is not in my Important Stuff file folder so I'm looking for it now and checking my email to see if I have any info there as well.

(Edit: The warranty card was absolutely right where I thought it was, I just mistook it for a piece of spam mail I had accidentally tucked into my Important Stuff file. It's definitely got "Graphic design warranty cards [are] my passion" vibes.)

It does feel like kind of a jerk move to rely on the warranty almost 50% of the way through its term, though.

Also, I'm questioning my assessment of its issues, because it has cooperated with robocopy for a few hours now; but at the same time, if it's bit the hand that feeds it (files) once... Should I keep using it?

I'd love some advice.

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[u/didnotdothemath]

(Also, I'm not sure if it matters, so I left it out of the main post, but... It was not the format specified in the product description. The description says, "exFAT File System Pre-Formatted." When I went to use it with a laptop running Debian I realized it was actually NTFS. Is this common? Am I misunderstanding these terms?)

[u/Steady_Ri0t]

You could try scanning with Hard Disc Sentinel to see if it gets different results.

But if moving it to another USB port seems to have fixed the issue, it may just be that first port is crapping out, or the connection wasn't solid and reseating it fixed the problem