A friend of mine was in a similar-ish circumstance.
He was using a 18TB Helium HDD with an external SATA to USB converter (with a power brick)
While writing data to it, it would randomly freeze mid-transfer.
It wouldn’t properly disconnect from the operating system either, it would just randomly freeze mid-transfer, and resume automatically. And the same freeze would happen while reading as well.
This issue disappeared when I told him to use a real PC with a proper PSU.
Before you replace the drive,
try changing the SATA cable.
If that doesn’t fix it, if you’re using a daisy chained SATA power cable, make sure to connect your HDD to the first hop(from the PSU) of that cable, and disconnect any devices being powered by the rest of the chain. The first hop is electrically most stable.
And if that doesn’t fix it, try changing the SATA power cable.
And if that doesn’t fix it, and if you’re using a modular PSU, try connecting your SATA power cable to a different SATA power port on your PSU.
And if that doesn’t fix it, try connecting it to a different “known working” PC, and redo steps 1-4 as needed.
If all of these fail, then yeah, replace the drive.
A friend of mine was in a similar-ish circumstance.
He was using a 18TB Helium HDD with an external SATA to USB converter (with a power brick)
While writing data to it, it would randomly freeze mid-transfer.
It wouldn’t properly disconnect from the operating system either, it would just randomly freeze mid-transfer, and resume automatically. And the same freeze would happen while reading as well.
This issue disappeared when I told him to use a real PC with a proper PSU.
Before you replace the drive,
If all of these fail, then yeah, replace the drive.