External Hard Drive: Possibly nadgered?

[Shingster]

A friend of mine wanted to format his external HDD the other day and seeing as I had a HD big enough to keep all his files on he brought it round to transfer other the files, but after about 4hrs of slow data transfer I started to get Data error: (cyclic redundancy check), warnings that stopped me from transferring over whole chunks of the HD. Now extracting any files or reading any off the drive is a monumental chore as it's extremely slow and 50/50 on whether i'll get the cyclic redundance error message or not.

What options does my friend have? I have most the files on the HD saved across now, so would formatting be an option or perhaps Freecom will replace the drive (it's around a year old, might be less)?

Could these problem have arisen because of transferring so much information over to my PC?

[ian turner]

Assuming your friend has been gradually building up the contents and not backing up to it in large chunks it sounds like you just discovered it's a duff drive that can't handle sustained transfers of large amounts of data.
It seems there is a 2 year guarantee on their drives (fairly crummy considering that the drive manufacturer will have offered a 3 year guarantee).
Only remove the drive from the case if the warranty is expired which it hasn't as that would void the warranty.
Wonder if it's a seagate barracuda of the duff batch variety inside.