External HDD First Aid Failure

It depends on whether the corruption is caused by a failing drive or not. Normally I suggest using DriveDx to check the health of a drive, but their download link/button is currently not working, so you can instead use SMARTReporter to check the drive health instead. Within SMARTReporter click on the "Drive Checks" icon at the top of the app window, then make sure "S.M.A.R.T." tab is highlighted, then click "Advanced Tools" tab in the middle of the app window. Then click the "Show Attributes" button for the drive you want to inspect....copy, the health report/attributes and paste the contents of that window here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

In order to check the health of an external drive you will need to install a special USB driver. Even with this special USB driver, some USB controller chips in external devices (adapters, enclosures) may not allow the necessary communication to access the external drive's health information.

FYI, people should always have frequent and regular backups of their external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.

user528 wrote:

booted up today, back to the same issues.

error: Unable to perform deferred repairs without full space verification

error: Try running fsck against the entire APFS container instead of a volume

then first aid doesn't work on APFS container either. I'm no expert at this, so looks like I have to buy a new one.

Then try erasing the whole physical drive and restoring from a backup. Erasing the drive will destroy all data on the drive.

The drive could still have some sort of hardware issue with the USB controller of the external drive or the USB data cable or adapter/dock/hub even though the drive itself looks healthy. The drive's health information won't show these types of issues. Even the Mac's USB port could possibly cause these issues.

Another option would be to erase the drive as MacOS Extended (Journaled) instead of APFS. APFS is a new file system and it sometimes seems more susceptible to issues which First Aid is unable to repair compared to the much older HFS+ file system (aka MacOS Extended). Besides, MacOS Extended (Journaled) file system is preferred when used on a hard drive as opposed to an SSD since APFS can be slower when used on a hard drive, plus APFS can make a hard drive work much harder since it has mechanical heads which need to move back & forth when data is fragmented. APFS was designed for SSDs where fragmentation is not a concern.

Hi,

If you can still mount the drive you mentioned, you'd better back up data of the drive to another drive as soon as possible, since you would need to reformat the drive.

The hard drive looks healthy.