My media files are on an external harddisk, a WD myPassport, 4 TB. It's partitioned with GPT as one big partition, formatted ExFat. It's USB powered, which is why I use a powered hub. It gets mounted at boot and spins down when I shutdown.
Lately I noticed files missing from a recently accessed folder. Today I witnessed the same, almost in real time. I was playing a test file, adjusting audio offset. I stopped playing the file, edited advancedsettings.xml, then rebooted the box. Entering the same folder with the test files it was empty.
Powered down, attached the disk to my mac, two out of four files in the folder where missing. "Repaired" the partition with OSX' disk utility, which found errors in the directory structure and claimed to have fixed it. The two files are still gone.
After that repair LE was also able to see the remaining files.
The last time a whole folder went missing.
I used testdisk (before disk utility) but the partition layout seemed to be ok. Contrary to LE (no files) and OSX (2 files out of 4) testdisk showed all four files (and not as deleted). So I could copy them. I would however not "write" the found partition table, as it contained a lot of strange files in various places as well.
So 1st, I think that something is definitely wrong with the disk.
2nd but neither disk utility nor WD's tool can find anything wrong with it (now).
Do you have any ideas what could have gone wrong? I mean, LE shouldn't even have had to write to the disk, it was just reading the file from there? Still, the files went missing by rebooting.
Any tests or logs I can provide to narrow this down?
Thank you