[Renato1 (Renato)]

Till a few days ago, none of my hard drives had ever failed from normal usage (one in a laptop failed after a light fighting dropped onto the laptop, smashing the keyboard and damaging the drive). I have plenty of external hard drives that plug into power points, and even the 20Gbyte one I bought 14 years ago still works fine.

Being cautious, three years ago I bought a slim Seagate 500Gbyte portable USB powered drive to back up stuff like photos and other important stuff, which I could put in a fireproof container at home, for when travelling overseas.

I haven't used it that much, but the other day I got the delayed write failure message, and after trying lots of demo recovery software packages, including Seagate's own one - well, it seems to be totally stuffed. There are scores of I/O errors, it can't be formatted, and the Seagate software says that it should be sent to their specialists.

So, the hard drive that I bought specifically for back-ups, is the hard drive that has failed miserably on me after a very short period of time. Rather ironic, isn't it?

We're pretty tech savvy around here. Has anybody else experienced this type of catastrophic failure in their slim portable hard drives?

I've decided to go out and buy a big plug-into-mains power external hard drive for backup purposes.
Regards,
Renato