File or directory is corrupt or unreadable.

[churin]

I have to decide what to do about the usb device now. What would you do if you are me? Take the following into account in your answer:

The machine was built about three years ago. In my recollection there was no hard drive or SSD which became inaccessible. At one time certain numbers of MP4 video files stored in an internal hd or a SSD were corrupted. About two years ago I started using three external usb hard drives and one of which is the one that became inaccessible recently. I never unplugged this mobile usb hard drive while file transfer is going.

What I can do now is to:
1) Reformat and resume using it
2) Replace the external hard drive(which comes with a SATA-USB adapter)

If the assessment is there is nothing wrong with the external usb storage drive, then I should go for 1). Whereas if the device is no longer trusted , then it must be replaced or as 2) above.

 

[CountMike]

No 1, I would think, (and I often do that), you checked disk itself and was fine so it may have been a glitch that happens with drives connected any which way. If you have or plan to have more external disks, a disk docking station or NAS with several disk places and own PSU that can be left connected permanently but switched on and off as needed would be more secure option. There are some with eSATA connection that is even faster than USB3. NAS (Network Attached Storage) can be left somewhere out of reach and accidents. It's slower but fast enough for streaming. It has own memory buffer so disk corruption due to interrupted transfer is less likely.

 

[churin]

OK, that's what I was going to do. I changed the file system from extFat to NTFS, and updated the drivers for the USB3 chipset, which, I hope, will make such "glitch" less likely to happen.
I thought about NAS many times in the past. Maybe it's time to get my feet wet.
Thanks for your follow-ups.