Going Nuts. HDD corruption!!

[Rayge]

Hey everybody.
I have a dell xps 435mt, read more about my rig in my profile.
Ive had nonstop issues but i'll skip the sob story.

I have lost over 3 terabytes of valuable information in the past few months.
The first one was my two 1.5TB ecogreen samsung drives in this enclosure (ICY DOCK MB662US-2S dual bay 3.5" SATA I & II to eSATA / USB 2.0 Screw-less external hard drive RAID enclosure for Mac & PC)
I lost so much data it was awful, and i'm still not even near recovering.
Today it was my 750gb hitachi drive in an external enclosure as well.
Both of them connect to the PC through esata.
I think maybe esata is to blame, or windows, but i cant do this anymore!
I've lost sooo much valuable and important stuff to me that it's nearly destroyed me.
The point is I can come to terms with the lost data cry but for this to happen again would be even more catastrophic.
How do I ensure this doesn't happen again?

Is there a driver or fix by microsoft for esata?
I have taken such good care of these drives and the oldest one is only about 8 months old.
They are not supposed to be acting up! So what's going wrong here?
I mean FFS I have a maxtor external connected through usb and it hasn't given me the slightest issue in the past 6-7 years.

 

[seekermeister]

What kind of data was on those hard drives? You have Ultimate...is it RTM or the RC?

 

[Rayge]

seekermeister it's OEM Dell win7 ultimate.
All kinds of data, pictures, music, backups, videos, text files. You name it, I lost it!

Another weird thing i've noticed is that my enclosure with 3TB on it shows up as only 700-something gigs on Paragon Partition Manager, but in everything else it shows the full 2.7~TB no problem.
Right now I'm formatting it again..

 

[seekermeister]

With that mix of data types, I'm not sure, but maybe one of these links wil suggest a solution:

Microsoft releases fix for Windows 7 MP3 corruption issue

Windows Home Server “Data Corruption Issue – KB 946676″ applies to Multi-Drive Home Servers

If you don't use the "Safely Remove Hardware: option is the notification area...then do.

You might also consider these settings:

For each disk:
1) disable "write-caching" on external drives,
2) disable "indexing" external drives
3) Set the "optimize for rapid removal" policy (This setting actually says you no longer have to use the "Safely Remove hardware", but do anyway).

 

[whs]

As a matter of protection, I would enable system restore points (shadowstorage) on those drives. That may take a little space, but may be an additional safety. You could also image the drives (if you have an additional drive for that) for further backup. Valuable data should never be stored in one place only. I image to 3 different disks - just in case.
As for the cause of the data loss, you should have a peek into your event viewer.

 

[logicearth]

I have taken such good care of these drives and the oldest one is only about 8 months old.
They are not supposed to be acting up! So what's going wrong here?

Hard Drives are like a box of chocolate. They can be dirt new and still malfunction.