mudbucker wrote:
Drive DX confirmed the drive is actually OK.
It is best to post the complete DriveDx text report here so we can review it to confirm. While DriveDx usually does a good job analyzing a hard drive, the interpretation of SSD health is much more complicated..
On their website they had an explanation of why First Aid failed:
macOS does not support diagnosing external drives using S.M.A.R.T. technology “out of the box” . In order to allow your Mac to diagnose external drives, you will need to install a special third party driver.
You’d think Apple could at least post a message about this when running First Aid. Hope this is of help to others who come here for help.
No, you misunderstand the difference between First Aid and DriveDX. First Aid is only scanning & repairing the file system and performs no checks of the physical drive or the drive's health attributes. Well, to be completely accurate, Disk Utility & macOS may show a "SMART status" indicator, but this is only triggered once the drive is nearly useless and only for internal drives. I've only ever seen Disk Utility/macos show a "Smart status: failed" message two times in twenty years, although I have replaced hundreds if not thousands of bad hard drives in that time.
DriveDx is actually check the physical health of the drives. Most drives these days have their own built-in SMART health monitoring system which keeps track of the physical characteristics of the drive & its behavior. DriveDx can alert the user to potential issues as soon as the drive begins to show signs of possible failure instead of waiting until the failure is imminent like Disk Utility/macOS. The drives will set a SMART failure status once those health attributes reach a critical level....meaning the drive is usually already unusable & needs immediate replacement.
When First Aid finds file system corruption, it could be caused from unexpected disconnect of the drive, or something else that corrupted the file system such as a bug. Or the file system corruption could be caused by a drive hardware failure.
It also appears your issues are when running First Aid on a Time Machine backup drive. I'm not sure how this may affect things, especially when trying to scan the Container portion. A TM backup these days is read-only, except when TM is writing the backups to the external drive.
If you have erased the whole physical external drive and still having issues, then most likely there is some sort of hardware issue with the external drive....maybe just the cable, adapter, enclosure, or possibly even the computer port....or it may be the physical drive (inside the enclosure) that has the problem.
