True, however, Seagate provide a utility so you can tell the HDD to go to sleep after inactivity - I've set it to 15 minutes so having left it to copy 4TB overnight it was sleeping when I came back, turned the PC off and disconnected.
yup, the disk fall to sleep, but, even when the Windows box hibernated [2], the disk might be still seen as mounted - I guess -.
"disk sleep" is different from "disk unmounted"
Try, if the Window has hibernated, to start the box WITH the disk still plugged and then disconnect the disk via right clicking on the USB icon in the right task bar area and something like "safely remove ..." or similar ... [1]
reconnect the disk to see if it's still seen as corrupt
[1]
dito suggested for LE:
either do it on a command line via "umount /dev/sd? " with a maybe one or two prior "sync" command(s)
or
shut down LE via power menu
then the shutdown process cleanly unmounts the disk for you
[2]
if you're running your windows on an SSD you do NOT have much benefits, apart from "could carry on the work where you left it (apps still running), doing hibernation.
search for "SSD wear leveling"
My PS: any views on ExFAT vs NTFS?
there exists a comparison of filesystems in wikipedia, search for it