Two crashed external drives in one week? Can a dock be at fault?

This is strange. As I posted here recently, I experienced my first crashed external disk at least since I started buying macs in 2009. It was a <4 year old WD Blue 4TB HDD in an Inateck toaster. It was my TM disk, so nothing critical was lost (I have CCC and Backblaze too). So yesterday, I ran CCC on one external drive full of home videos, backing it up to <2 year old Sandisk Extreme 2TB SSD. Today I noticed that the Sandisk was grayed out in the Disk Utility, and wouldn’t mount. I ran DiskDrill on it, and it doesn’t look good. I can’t even reformat it.

So this is two crashed external drives within a week? Yes, yes, I know, “over the last 16 years, you’re still doing great!” hahaha. Still seems suspicious to me. Has anything changed recently? The only thing in common is the new Caldigit TS3+ that they are both plugged into. Coincidence?

I believe SanDisk SSDs have problems especially the SanDisk Extreme, if I remember correctly. Much stuff written about it on the net. Here is one video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jeu4cq2apfU

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It could be a massive co-incidence. If you get a 3rd though I’d start to be very worried.

That’s definitely suspicious, especially with both drives failing so close together. Test them with a different dock or directly plugged into your Mac to see if the Caldigit TS3+ is the common factor.

I had a similar feeling when two external drives (3TB Seagate) and Western Dig portal drive both went belly up after being connected to a Belkin Thunderbolt doc. Never could prove it