copying files (cp and rsync) to external HDD causes i/o errors and loss of data on destination

I am trying to back up data (230 GB, 160k files), over USB3.0 to a newly bought external Seagate Expansion Portable Drive of 4 TB, formatted as NTFS. I am running Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS. I first tried using a simple cp command in the terminal, but after only copying a few percent, the copying started stuttering and became slow. After some time the disk became unresponsive. Remounting the disk did not work. I tried connecting the disk to another computer, and was first unable to mount it, and then after a few attempts, it would mount but read/write would be very slow. Once the cp starts failing, I get the following errors in dmesg (all these messages are repeating multiple times but with some different numbers): [67598.098118] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#18 uas_zap_pending 0 uas-tag 19 inflight: CMD [67598.098122] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#18 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 1c 75 24 18 00 00 04 00 00 00 [67598.225621] usb 1-9: reset high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd [67598.378202] scsi host4: uas_eh_device_reset_handler success [67598.378466] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#14 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_RESET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK [67598.378468] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#14 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 1c 74 d0 18 00 00 04 00 00 00 [67598.378470] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 4772384792 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x104000 phys_seg 128 prio class 0 [67598.378473] buffer_io_error: 246 callbacks suppressed [67598.378474] Buffer I/O error on dev sdb2, logical block 596515075, lost async page write [67635.212662] scsi host4: uas_eh_device_reset_handler start [67635.213657] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#28 uas_zap_pending 0 uas-tag 10 inflight: CMD [67635.213658] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#28 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 1c 75 e8 18 00 00 04 00 00 00 [67635.340988] usb 1-9: reset high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd [67635.490335] scsi host4: uas_eh_device_reset_handler success I left the disk for a week, and then did a SMART scan using the Seagate Bootable Tool, which showed no issues. Thus, I attempted copying the data again. The disk would mount properly now and I could read/write without issues, so I started an rsync command. First I did rsync -avh source dest It worked, albeit slowly, for about 20 % of the data, then it started stuttering so I stopped the transfer. I restarted the transfer using rsync -avhW source dest --inplace to try and make it faster. It ran great, much faster than the first attempt, but after a few minutes, I received errors: rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "..." : Input/output error (5) rsync: write failed on "...": Input/output error (5) rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(393) [receiver=3.1.2] In dmesg I see the following: [ 6772.890553] buffer_io_error: 1092735 callbacks suppressed [ 6772.890556] Buffer I/O error on dev sdb2, logical block 874428, async page read Once this happened, the disk became unresponsive. After a few minutes I could remount it, and checking the folder to which I was copying data it is completely empty, including the files that were properly copied during my first rsync attempt. I did not try to restore any data to see if the data was still intact, I suppose that it is only the file table that has been corrupted. The files that were being copied at the time of failure are of type .mat.gz, on the order of 1 MB each. As a sidenote, an old external Seagate disk recently broke when I was copying small amounts of data from it, on this computer (the infamous click of death...), which was also my first HDD ever to die. I have no idea what to make of this, if the problem lies with how I am copying data (can copying data destroy disks?), if the problem lies with hardware (computer, HDD, USB-SATA converter, ...) or if it has to do with Ubuntu... Normally I only run Manjaro and I never experienced this kind of issues.