Harddrive Needs formatting? after 4 months of use, worst hard drive i've had

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
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so i can see it in, Device manager/Disk Drives, i set it to show empty drives, and 2 seconds later it disapeared and said i needed to format it to use it again for the 180th time, i’m on Windows 7 professional, i have never disconnected it, i start and turn off the computer with it plugged in, its a 2 TB external with a seperate power suply. the hard drive stopped in the middle of the night while i was watching movies plus i forgot to mention i was finishing a download. my friend downloaded the same file and had no problems