This is a follow up to this question: Why have 3 external HDDs failed after a few hours of use?
I have purchased 3 HDDs in the past month and every time after copying about 1.5TB of data on to them they fail. The first 2 HDDs were Samsung 4TB drives and the third one is a Seagate Expansion 4TB.
The model number of the most recent drive (Seagate) is: STEA4000400
The first 2 drives (Samsung) were: HX-M401TCB/G My computer is a Thinkpad Yoga 12 All drives are powered by the USB port; no external power supply.
What I do is buy the HDD I need then plug it into my computer (running Linux) and transfer the data (about 2TB) from my old HDD (also a 4TB portable Samsung drive). After a few hours of copying the transfer speed slows down alot and then the drive fails and won't mount on either my machine or any other machine, and it makes a very faint ticking sound when connected. I have tried reformatting the drives (sometimes I am able to mount the drive long enough to reformat) but it does not help.
My third HDD has failed again and it does not work on my Raspberry Pi either. I am running Linux Mint which when copying a large amount of data to my HDD (over 60GB) it sometimes freezes for a few seconds. I was wondering, is it possible that the operating system is actually damaging the HDD (ie on Windows or MacOS this would not happen)?