Ok let me start by saying that this was my fault, as I happened to drop the thing while I was cleaning my Xbox. Anyway, I'd already done this once before so I was prepared for my heart to be destroyed, and once I plugged it back in the games were all corrputed and the drive started to drop and reappear on the Xbox at certain intervals.

So I'm thinking the 8TB drive (yes lol) is a paperweight and that I just made a very costly blunder, but I decide to try to reformat it on my laptop in the off chance that the thing is ok... and it actually worked. The drive formatted and appeared on the screen just fine. Left it plugged in for an hour and didn't see it disappear and reappear, so everything seemed normal. Anyway, plug it into the Xbox and tries again. Things seem normal at first, I install a small game and it works fine, so I decide to reinstall NHL 20. It gets to about 95% before crapping out, and once I try to play the game it no longer works, and any of the contents I had on the drive refuse to run. Then the drive starts to disappear and reappear and I'm prepared to blow my brains out from frustration.

So back the laptop, I reformatt it and everything seems fine, but I decide to do a little more testing this time. I install a couple steam games and run them on the drive, and they work JUST FINE. I then decide to install HDDSCAN and it shows everything to be OK except for the "Reallocation sector count" which does have a yellow warning sign to the side. It shows a value of 095 and a threashold of 010. Otherwise though, the state of the drive appears fine according to the device. Meanwhile I run command prompt to see if I have any files on a bad sector, and no there is nothing there either. I am officially fucking stumped and almost befuddled at this sort of development. Any suggests from the fine folks here, or is this voodo shit that I have no control over and I should officially give up lol?

Sounds like the solution is to just play on PC.

Yeah. Run a full check disk. There could be some corruption though, I would personally take the opportunity to upgrade/replace it rather than take a chance with data loss.