The S.M.A.R.T. data from the drive should tell if the problem is with the drive itself or not.

That's always step #1 with these things.

I was copying a few hundred GB of media files to a USB drive a few weeks ago -- the USB drive was formatted with NTFS. After the copy, and a "safe shutdown".. the next morning the drive was unreadable. Lost the 500GB of original contents plus the freshly copied stuff.

Had to recopy it all (again).
Not a hardware problem in this case, just an NTFS issue of some kind.

Cheers