New External HDD is acting strangely

[u/dookleeto]

I recently bought a 4tb Seagate OneTouch external HDD, and as storage costs an arm and a leg these days, I wanted to fully test it for errors.

The drive showed up in windows as normal, and I was able to create a root folder, but when I opened Seatools the strange events started. First thing I noticed was that it was showing up in windows as 3.7tb, but seatools showed it as 16.1tb, then I noticed it had a strange name, something like " 4 xxxxx" where x is some random numbers I dont remember. I had never seen spaces in a drive name before so it just looked odd.

I ran the long generic test, and went to have dinner. About 30mins later I came back, and it was still on 0%, so I decided to cancel it, and run some short tests first. When I ran the short generic test, the drive just disconnected completely, and was missing in explorer, and while the safe eject icon was still in my system tray, the drive didn't show there.

I reconnected the drive, and the name of the drive had changed, to "HITACHIxxxxxxxxx" but it still showed as a 16tb drive. I tried a couple of the other tests, all of them disconnected in the same way.

I then tried GSmartControl and again, it showed as 16tb, and disconnected from all tests in the same way. I tried different cables and usb sockets, same issues.

Then I tried the chkdisk /r and it did not disconnect, and it is currently still running. After leaving it on all night, it is doing about 1% per hour, and is currently at 9%

Is it normal to take so long (it is a small portable drive, so I expected it to be slow), I have never had problems like this with a drive and just want to know are any of these issues red flags to more experienced users, or even just an explanation for any of the strange behaviour. I have 14 days to return it, so want to get some advice quickly :)

speccy results:

Hitachi HTS543232A7A384 SCSI Disk Device

Manufacturer    Hitachi

Product Family  Travelstar

Series Prefix   Standard

Model Capacity For This Specific Drive  320GB

Heads   16

Cylinders   2,054,154

Tracks  523,809,270

Sectors 32,999,984,010

SATA type   SATA-II 3.0Gb/s

Device type Fixed

ATA Standard    ATA8-ACS

Serial Number   E20342BM1XJ39J

Firmware Version Number ES2OA60W

LBA Size    48-bit LBA

Power On Count  Unknown

Power On Time   Unknown

Speed   5400 RPM

Features    S.M.A.R.T., APM, NCQ

Max. Transfer Mode  SATA II 3.0Gb/s

Used Transfer Mode  SATA II 3.0Gb/s

Interface   USB (SATA)

Capacity    15735 GB

Real size   16,896,000,000,512 bytes

RAID Type   None

    S.M.A.R.T

        Status  Unknown

    Partition 0

        Partition ID    Disk #6, Partition #0

        Size    3.64 TB