I'm running into a frustrating issue while trying to fill up my new external hard drives. I have two Seagate Exos X24 20TB drives set up, and I'm migrating data from an old Western Digital drive. However, when I reach about 19TB of data, I get an error message saying, 'The operation can't be completed. An unexpected error occurred (error code -50).' This stops me from copying files and even prevents me from creating new folders on the drive. I initially formatted the drives to ExFat, then reformatted one to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but the issue remains. I've updated my MacBook Pro to the latest software version as well. Now, I cannot even put the data back on the WD drive, which has never had issues before. I'm using a 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro with a 5-bay USB-C external drive enclosure.
2 Answers
It sounds like you've done a lot of troubleshooting already! Just to clarify, have you deleted any files from the old WD drive after copying them to the new drives? Sometimes, not having enough free space can trigger that error, especially when files are moved rather than copied. Make sure that the original files are still where they need to be. You could also try deleting any unnecessary files from the new drives to see if that helps.
Error -50 often hints at a problem with the file system. Since you reformatted the drive, it might be worth checking if the drives were set to a proper format for large files. The APFS format would be ideal for your Mac, especially for large quantities of data. Also, try running Disk Utility's First Aid feature on the new drives to fix any underlying issues.
Related Questions
Lenovo Thinkpad Stuck In Update Loop Install FilterDriverU2_Reload