Pendrives and External HD problem.

[Gabriel Teixeira]

Greetings.
I have a Mac Book Pro , with High Sierra and I keep getting into the same problem.
Since last year I've been having lots of problems with pendrives and external HDs. I "eject" them always to prevent them from corrupting and I'm careful with them not to stay near phones and stuff like that.
I use Avast, MacBooster6 and MalwareBites on my mac to check for virus and stuff like that. I had a problem with a malware that opened a lot of ads but its solved (by me, since when I left it at apple care they said it was fine, and it was not).
Still, my problem is:
- 1st my external HD, a WD formatted into FAT32 that previously worked just fine, got kinda of corrupted. I was unable to use it or even recognise it on my mac. On windows I worked but too slowly. Then it simply became unreadable.
- 2nd my pendrive Kingston 32gb. Same as before.
- And now another 32gb pendrive. This one still opens but it ejects itself (and not in the safe way, it says something like "you did not remove it safely"). And in Windows it still works but it takes like 1h to delete 190mb with 3.0 port and the pendrive is also 3.0. And it will probably stop working.

At Apple they say there's nothing wrong with my computer.

Any thoughts? Please help
Thanks in advance.

 

[honestone]

Are the two "pendrives" actually pendrives, or flash drives? Here is what I found out about the differences between the two:

"The major difference between a pen drive and flash drive is that a pen drive is generally only used as a mobile USB storage device, whereas a flash drive has many different uses for data storage. Another difference is that the pen drive always refers to a drive that can be plugged directly into a USB port."

Note that in that description, "pendrive" is actually 2 words.

Be that as it may, what brand is the other pen drive?

Now, given that you are having issues with all those devices on both a windows PC and your Mac, it would seem to be a hardware issue with those devices. Additionally, sometimes WD external drives "do not play nicely" with Macs.

I have 5 USB flash drives by various manufacturers, of various capacities, and they all work fine on both of my Macs (using the latest version of High Sierra on both). Also, I have two external devices (Samsung SSDs installed inside nice, slim Orico enclosures with USB 3.0 connectivity), and they work fine also.

When you connect one of the pen drives in one of the USB ports, can Disk Utility recognize it? If it can, try and Erase and Format the pen drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled, with GUID Partition Map). See if that helps.

 

[Gabriel Teixeira]

Are the two "pendrives" actually pendrives, or flash drives? Here is what I found out about the differences between the two:

"The major difference between a pen drive and flash drive is that a pen drive is generally only used as a mobile USB storage device, whereas a flash drive has many different uses for data storage. Another difference is that the pen drive always refers to a drive that can be plugged directly into a USB port."

Note that in that description, "pendrive" is actually 2 words.

Be that as it may, what brand is the other pen drive?

Now, given that you are having issues with all those devices on both a windows PC and your Mac, it would seem to be a hardware issue with those devices. Additionally, sometimes WD external drives "do not play nicely" with Macs.

I have 5 USB flash drives by various manufacturers, of various capacities, and they all work fine on both of my Macs (using the latest version of High Sierra on both). Also, I have two external devices (Samsung SSDs installed inside nice, slim Orico enclosures with USB 3.0 connectivity), and they work fine also.

When you connect one of the pen drives in one of the USB ports, can Disk Utility recognize it? If it can, try and Erase and Format the pen drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled, with GUID Partition Map). See if that helps.

Hey Honestone. Thanks for your reply!
The other is a lexar.
They are both pendrives.
And I forgot to mention it was not only one wd external hd, but 2 ...

The problem is that I need these equipments to be able to read and write both in mac and pc. Therefore I can+t format it to that. And I can't lose the files in there, even though by now they're probably corrupted.

My Disk Utility doesn't even recognise the pen drives nor the wd's.

 

[honestone]

Hey Honestone. Thanks for your reply!
The other is a lexar.
They are both pendrives.
And I forgot to mention it was not only one wd external hd, but 2 ...

The problem is that I need these equipments to be able to read and write both in mac and pc. Therefore I can+t format it to that. And I can't lose the files in there, even though by now they're probably corrupted.

My Disk Utility doesn't even recognise the pen drives nor the wd's.

If the equivalent Disk Utility program on a Windows PC can't recognize them either, then it's definitely an issue with the devices themselves.

Can you try another, brand new flash drive? Better to try a flash drive than a pen drive, based on what I quoted above. If the new pen drive/flash drive works, then you know for sure that it is an issue with those devices.