damage to EHD?

[sturg]

So I've decided to attach, semi-permanently, my Samsung T5 EHD to the case cover of my laptop using some Velcro. I intend to use it to store large files and folders of stuff, like my enormous music collection. Reason: the available flash memory storage on my school/work laptop is a total of 121 GB.
I am just wondering if all of the opening and closing of the computer will damage the EHD, especially when I forget to go through the correct process of ejecting it each time, which I've done several times already. Just wondering if this will have an affect on the drive over time.

 

[IWT]

You're dancing with danger if you fail to "Eject Drive" before removing the connection; especially if it happens repeatedly.

This, I would say, is more likely to lead to difficulties than just opening/closing the lid.

Ian

 

[sturg]

Ty Ian, your reply got me wondering about the health of my Samsung EHD. So I ran first aid from disk utility and the first time it failed to complete, but the second time it worked fine. Then the third time I got the error message again, and then the fourth time it was fine. And so this went on, repeating in the same fashion, every other time fine and then failing. What does this mean? Is there a better way, or app I could use to check the health on that ssd? I should mention that I checked it on two different comps, one with Monterey and the other with Catalina, and it did the exact same thing.

 

[IWT]

My personal view is that if an EHD, such as your Samsung, misbehaves or has anything short of a complete health check, then that EHD is suspect at best. Four times you've checked and sometimes it's ok and other times it's dodgy.

I could not trust that EHD to store or save critical data. Personal view, as I said. Sorry.

Ian

 

[Rod]

It may continue to work and for convenience that may be fine but I certainly would not store unique data on it. As others have said it can't be 100% relied on but then I have two backups of everything.

 

[vansmith]

At the very least, the health of the drive might be fine (in the short term) but files may not. The purpose of ejecting/unmounting a drive, in part, is to ensure that data isn't being read from and written to the disk. You'll see this in action if you try to eject a drive when you are writing to it.

You're also killing the drive's power source when it isn't expecting to be disconnected.

 

[sturg]

Ty for these informative replies. I sent the drive back to Samsung for them to check. When I get it back I will definitely be more careful with it.
I did see an app, Jettison, that seems to do the ejecting and connecting for you. Not sure if it's any good or not.

 

[Rod]

You can check out Jettison on the Mac App Store if it's available in your location, it's not available on the Australian Apo Store. There are some alternatives but Jettison is the only one that automatically dissconnects USB devices on Sleep. I don't know if it reconnects on Wake if not that could be a pain. The alternatives only act as a single action to dissconnect All USB devices so you still need to action it but handy if you have multiple devices connected.

 

[sturg]

Yes, apparently there are several apps that do the same thing. I purchased one called Ejectify. Gonna see how well it works.