Can a Mac Pro cause an external hard drive to fail

This sounds like something very similar that happened to me while on the road when I lost two 2TB Thunderbolt Lacie Rugged Portable Drives . I was downloading 2 x 128GB SonyXQD cards (2 x USB3 readers) on my Mid 2014 MBP to 2 bus powered Rugged drives using Shotput Pro and in the process both drives simultaneously failed. (Failed to mount to any laptop though physically they were undamaged)

It happened when I noticed longer than normal transfer times and decided to restart my laptop. I unmounted my camera cards (the two XQD cards) and (i think) "restarted" my MBP with (regrettably) the two Rugged drives mounted in the two individual thunderbolt ports on my laptop. After the restart... The drives did not mount. I ran Disk Utility and got the same warnings and messages about repair in your first post. These two drives were the only double back-up of my video files shot while on location doing a documentary . The simultaneous loss of two drives was quite a shock as they represented 5 days of filming. I did recover all the files using Seagate File Recovery, but it did make for a very nerve racking overnight as the recovery software did its job. (I now have DiskWarrior to help as well)

On my return from the field I spoke to Apple Care and took my MBP to my local genius bar for further diagnostics. There was a collective "this shouldn't of happened". Even restarting with both drives attached to the laptop shouldn't of damaged the directories. But, it did and there was still a funky mounting issue with portable drives. Sometimes drives would mount and sometimes they would not and the times a drive mounted it may or may not unmount without force ejecting. No software issues were found and no hardware issues were identified by diagnostics. The last "reset" the tech at the bar could do was a SMC reset. Reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac - Apple Support After this reset all drives started mounting and unmounting as they should. The tech surmised that the thunderbolt and USB ports had some kind of an extra residual charge that may of zapped the 2 drives and continued to cause mounting and unmounting issues. Haven't had problems since the SMC reset. (He said the "extra charge" could of happened because of a faulty thunderbolt connector, but I think that was just slightly more plausible as caused by evil faeries.)

Now I realized that there are a few things that may not of been best practices. Restarting my MBP with both back-up drives mounted instead of unmounting, restarting and then remounting the drives for starters. Even the idea of having my only copies of files on two separate drives mounted to the same computer at the same time now gives me pause. But, this is somewhat of a necessity as I have a lot of downloading at the end of a day and the only way it doesn't take hours to do my end of day data management is to use ShotPut Pro to download and make the double backup at the same time. (After a long day I don't need to baby sit downloads for another two hours.)

I am still trying to take what happened in the field and turn that into a new "best practices" while I am working in the field. I wanted to add to this thread to see if others have had this double drive directory failure.

There is an enormous difference between a drive that has "failed" and on where Disk Utility verify or repair returns an error.

Disk Utility should be named Disk directory Utility. It checks the directory ONLY of the drive for self consistency, that all the pointers and B-trees are pointing to the right places, that nothing became orphaned, that no two files are occupying the same block, that no blocks are lost. ALL of these issue are software problems.

The problem you reported are NOT drive failures in any way, and are not Hardware related in any way, unless the message you are getting is exactly "I/O Error", which may or may not be a Hardware problem, (but is often routine and fixable).

No drives died. Some had directory problems.

As i said, these are software problems, and are likely caused by software. Having these problems occur at all is unusual. Having a second one after a first one is not.

are you running any third-party disk helpers? mac cleaners? speeder-uppers?

do you have anything wacky installed in

/Library/Extensions

(there is usually a set of drivers for common add-on cards and ThunderBolt devices there).

Mine has:

file:///Library/Extensions/ACS6x.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/ArcMSR.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/ATTOCelerityFC8.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/ATTOExpressSASHBA2.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/ATTOExpressSASRAID2.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/CalDigitHDProDrv.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/HighPointIOP.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/HighPointRR.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/hp_io_enabler_compound.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/PromiseSTEX.kext/

file:///Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext/

those all look look tame. Nothing wacky. Your epson and my hp are both printer driver supporters.

this problem might be down to "just because".

I suggest you run a Disk Utility ( Repair Disk ) and move on.

run it again until nothing changes.

if this is a scratch disk, try throwing away stuff you really don't need, then repair again.

if no joy, you may need to follow the built-in advice in the last line.

1) Is it possible for a firewire port on the tower to damage, burn out, or otherwise cause an external drive to fail? What about a USB port? In other words - could my computer itself be causing drives to fail?

if such an extremely unlikely event had occurred, I would expect those ports to now be completely inoperable.

There are no widely-known mechanisms that would cause your drives to fail in this way, except major power supply issues, and those would leave your entire Mac inoperable.

It does appear that the drive you tired to repair has some additional problems. What about the others? are they really messed up, or just need a quick fix with disk Utility?

I just looked through some reviews of A G|Tech RAID (FW800 and USB3) at Amazon, and see that some other people have reported problems:

I've used these drives for nearly two years and I can't say I recommend them. In June 2015 had one of the pair I ordered fail, but even before that I was already trying to be sure I had multiple backups of the data on them. Firewire performance is spotty at best, becomes very unreliable when chained.

It's the newest drive I have, and sometimes it crashes, sometimes it works, but more often recently it's stopped working altogether. I have built my own redundancy system with my own hard drives, but safe to say, it's a time consuming situation to try and both recover the data that you lost and then back-up the material again that once existed on that drive.

After placing the drive at the extent of the usb 3 cable that comes with the drive (and also many others), so that there is tension on the cable at a 45 degree bend the drive was able to mount on my machine. ANY release of tension on the cable and the drive would unmount again. Like I said, I tried a few different usb 3 cables and firewire 800 cables in both the ports with the same result. My guess is a faulty connection of the ports inside the drive housing. Needless to say I backed up the data (all night) while a connection could still be made. Scary stuff though, really precarious connection on such an expensive drive.

This product turned out to be nothing more than a paperweight, whereas I needed it for my business to store thousands of photos from photoshoots we do. It doesn't help when it doesn't mount to my hard drive.

I have had no luck with this model. I had two of these in a row that had thrashing head movements after a couple of days of service. Seems coincidental, I'm sure. But when the "whoosh-whoosh" sounds happen and there is no commanding being done, then the unit is going bad. I had put my computer to sleep to make sure no background work to the drive was being done, and the thrashing sounds continued. Interestingly enough, the heads behaved well when commanded.
It seems that the problem with the heads is related to read/write errors. I went to back up what I had and did a comparison (2.5 days!) between drives. Half of the files had errors.

There are positive reviews, too, of course, but enough people have reported failures that I would hesitate to buy one. It might be time to look into a different solution.