DRIVE FAILURES! Swapping out drives in an external enclosure - is this a bad thing?

I seem to have a major issue with drive errors and failures and was wondering if it’s something I’m doing wrong.

When I say “failures,” I mean that the drive is still readable/writeable but that there are bad sectors and I’ve lost massive amounts of data. So I guess technically-speaking, it’s not necessarily a failure, but that basically makes it a junk drive for all intents and purposes.

I use solely WD internal drives (currently a WD1001FALS) connected via Rosewill external hard drive enclosures. Fans are running and drives stay cool, so they’re not baking themselves. I routinely swap out the drives in the enclosures depending upon what projects I’m working on - I edit video and photos. When not in the enclosure, they’re stored in CRU Driveboxes/Wiebtech hard drive boxes.

Buying bare internal drives is cheaper for me, but with all these failures it’s starting to not be worth it.

They’re occassionally transported from my home office to my corporate office, 20 minutes in the car, and it’s not like they’re beat around/thrown/dropped/etc. They’re generally handled like a fragile piece of equipment.

Is it a bad idea to constantly swap drives? Is there a proper way to store all the drives besides in the driveboxes?

When disconnected from the computer, I either use the “Safely Remove Hardware” Windows7 function and/or shut the computer down and power down the drive once the computer has completely turned off.

My office has a dehumidier to eliminate any possible moisture issue. Thankfully I make sure to back up everything on a separate archival drive (and I’ve routinely had to call upon them to restore damaged/corrupted files).

This makes approximately 4-5 drives in 2011 that I have had go down. What the heck is going wrong?

i think you have very bad luck my friend…

see how mine is treated :stuck_out_tongue: has 4 years in my house  and 400 days turned on  without a single bad sector… only cable errors no kind of read or write errors… you treat your drive beter than i treat my drives… normaly i left the drives on the table where i work or in a drawer… sometimes i even put the computer to sleep to exchange my drives…

its the only way to update without rebooting the computer xD

better luck next time :confused:

confirm that is everything ok with the power suply of the case… maybe the case isnt supplying enought juice and that ruins the drive …