External hard drive causing router to flake out

[steelo]

Hi,

 

I have a Nighthawk R7000 I purchased about 2 years ago, firmware is all up to date on it. Connected to the USB 3 port on the router is a Seagate 1 TB external HDD that is about 3 years old. It's been working great up until a few months ago. Whenever I stream a movie or TV show from the HDD, about an hour in the video will freeze and I'll have to reboot the router to get it to work again. I've also noticed that whenever I keep my PC up and don't connect to the network drive, the router seems to run fine. If I have to access the network drive at some point, which makes me type in a password and then keep my PC up after use, I'll have to reboot my router 1-2 times that day. It's as if prolonged use causes the HDD to fail which in turn freezes the router.

 

 Last night I tried directly connecting the external HDD directly to my PC to see if I could read the files. I had to try 2 separate USB ports before Windows even registered the drive. I ran chkdsk but it found no errors on the drive, so I wonder if it may be going bad. As of now, the HDD is connected to my PC via USB and I'll try streaming Plex from there...it would be a lot more convenient though to have it directly connected to the router.

 

I'm curious why this HDD is freezing my router. Should I try formatting this drive?