As I suspected my repeat try of the butterfly test on the USB drive showed no bad sectors. So it appears the drive is shutting down intermittently.

Along the line of power, the power supply wears out over time. I had one computer not consistently power up and replacing the power supply resolved it. Maybe it could effect USB ports initially.

I do hear an intermittent noise from this computer. I checked the two internal drives and they past the smart test. The solid state drive is a year old. The other internal drive is a terabyte drive where I have one backup of the UltraPak. It passes the smert test. I am thinking it is likely a fan making the noise. Maybe I should run the "temperature monitor" which I noticed is available in this HDDscan program found at http://hddscan.com/ with the ctrl+f search. Not sure how I would use it :-) I tried it on the terabyte drive and it shows 26 degrees on both readings???? The temperature monitor is not available for the USB drive. For now I am unplugging it when not in use.

After completing the test on the external USB drive successfully (no bad sectors) I tried to use the "remove hardware safely" process and it could not find it. So the USB drive appears to have turned off just after the test.

Last edited by bowlesj; 01/22/19 12:25 PM.
John Bowles
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