Brand New 8TB Seagate Ironwolf Always Becoming Inaccessible

[tipcroni]

I bought a brand new 8TB Seagate Ironwolf ~2 weeks ago and started transferring files from my older 4TB Seagate Barracuda (drive E / NTFS) to the Ironwolf (NTFS). Both are connected to a docking station (Orico Docking Station) which is then connected to my PC (Win10 64 / MSI X570 Tomahawk / Ryzen 5 5600X). Everything went smoothly until I did the following:

• formatted the 4TB Barracuda and removed its drive letter (E)
• changed the drive letter of the new Ironwolf to E

 

After doing those two things, the Ironwolf suddenly showed up as RAW and using CHKDSK wouldn't bring the partition back for some reason. I used DMDE to recover the files from the Ironwolf to another spare 4TB Barracuda (drive F / exFAT). Ever since that time, every time I try to put files back into the Ironwolf, certain files would show up as corrupted and would make the HDD inaccessible again and I'd have to restart the whole recovery process. Meanwhile, my drive F would also become inaccessible but a simple CHKDSK /f would solve the issue. Two days ago, I once again formatted my Ironwolf HDD (drive E) but decided not to put any of the recovered files (mostly video files) in it and simply chose to re-download on the internet. My thought process was maybe the recovered files were causing the issues and would result in the HDD becoming corrupted.

 

Downloading the new files off the internet and into the Ironwolf was going very well and I checked to see that each file was opening and playing properly until 2 hrs ago when 3 newly downloaded videos didn't open on mpv and didn't generate a thumbnail (like this) for "healthy" files that would open and play normally. I decided to restart my PC just to see if the problem would go away and lo and behold, the Ironwolf (drive E) was again inaccessible along with my other Barracuda (drive F). However, doing CHKDSK /f allowed me to access both (!! progress) once again, but the Ironwolf (drive E) has "deleted" my files -- files are clearly still there since there's used space shown on My Computer, but I can't see them thru Windows.

 

The attached files shows the results of CHKDSK /f for my Ironwolf (drive E) and what CrystalDiskInfo says about its health.

 

1. Is there anything wrong with my Ironwolf?
2. What else is there for me to do to try and get this working properly without fear of suddenly losing data on it?
3. Are there conflicts being carried-over by my use of drive letter E somehow?
4. Do I need to format the Ironwolf a certain way?
5. Is the Ironwolf not suited for non-NAS setups?

 

I'm really stumped for a solution outside of buying a new HDD, which I'm not keen on since the Ironwolf wasn't cheap.

 

PS. Here's my post on Reddit that went unnoticed detailing my trouble from days ago before I decided to post here. It's worded differently since I was trying other things out, but the gist is the same.

PPS. IMGUR album of errors I've screenshotted aside from my post here

 

[tipcroni]

Update to this:

 

I wiped the Ironwolf using Partition Wizard and selected "Fill sectors with One." Initialized to GPT > format NTFS. Repopulated the disk with only a few files and everything was working out seemingly well for a few days. I then downloaded a video, confirmed that it works, then copied the file to the Ironwolf. Upon checking the directory, the video did not generate a thumbnail on the Ironwolf drive and CHKDSK once again shows corruption and I cannot access the disk without formatting it.

 

Can anyone help? The only other option I can think of trying is wiping the disk again using Partition Wizard and choosing the very slow wipe (DoD 3 or 7 passes).