I am running Windows 11 and restic 0.19 with the repo going to an external usb hard drive. After the backup finishes a “check --read-data-subset=1%” is done. This has been fine for a long time then some errors started to show up. So I thought the disk drive is being flaky, and bought a new drive (Seagate model SRDONF2). But now the new drive is also showing check errors.
What external drives are you using that do not have errors? (prefer inexpensive) Would you recommend stop using spinning rust and paying much more for an external SSD to get the reliability?
The odds of both drives being suspect seem slim. I’d rule out your system’s USB interface before going any further - I’ve been burned by USB many times.
If you’ve got multiple USB ports on your system, try another port and see if you can reproduce the problem, especially if they port is run by a different controller (this is usually the case if you have some USB 3.0, some USB 2.0 some USB 3.1, etc.)
I’d also try the drive(s) in another system if you can, and again, see if you can reproduce the issue. If you can reproduce the problem across two systems, that’d be pretty damning evidence the drive is at fault.
I don’t think an external SSD will be any more or less reliable than an external spinning HDD honestly. It would be more impact resistant though 
Thanks for the switching usb interface suggestion. I try it out.