External HD issues

Hi all,

So I've been having a nightmare of a problem. I work with a lot of different external portable hard drives on my AW17. A lot of my clients give me hard drives that are formatted for Mac. So a year ago I started using the app Macdrive that way there's no issues, I can plug in any hard drive and start working with the contents no problem.

Well a few days ago when trying to transfer files from one to another I had a hard drive crash and become corrupted, had very important files on it and I ended up paying $500 at a data recovery place just to get files back. But since then I've noticed it's happened to a few of my other hard drives. They just don't work right. They freeze up when I try to copy files off of them and end up freezing the whole computer. After a few reboots of my laptop they stop functioning all together, I can't see them in "my computer" and all the data is gone.
It seems like it's happening only to the drives that were at one point formatted for Mac. What the hell is going on? I'm corrupting tones of drives and losing tones of vital data to my work. I uninstalled Macdrive and reinstalled it thinking that was the issue but no luck. Is this a problem with the laptop?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

So I've been doing a ton of research and I'm not really coming up with much. This is becoming REALLY problematic since my work relies on me using all sorts of different portable hard drives.
I'm afraid to plug any of my other ones in and lose valuable data. My computer is just destroying these drives for some reason.
One thing I've been reading is that a lot of hard drive issues seem to be related to power problems. Could it be that my power brick for my AW17 is messed up? The battery in my laptop is practically useless these days too. I don't think it can hold a charge for even 15mins, not sure if that would affect anything since I'm always plugged in with the power supply.

 

well my friend theres one sure fire way to find out if its a power problem, pull out a multimeter and see what the voltage is on your ports, and what kind of AW17 do you have? is it usb 2.0 or 3.0? ect... how old are all of the drives, what brands and models? ect..

Ive had drives brick on me several times through out the years from age, being dropped ect. But I find it really odd its only ex mac format and all at the same time, I would also ask other people using Macdrive and see if anyone else is having an issue