Have to review my answer above. Although the frequency of the crashes reduced after I removed it from the Spotlight search it is still crashing. My drive is still crashing when I am copying large files or if I am copying a large number of files out of the drive. It seems to be related to power management. I took a couple of extra measures that are listed on other forums like: Checking the option "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" uncheck "Put the hard drive to sleep when possible" And increased the time for disk sleep to the maximum with Pmset (command line). But I still have the external drive crashing... In the end, I didn't find the solution after all.