Crashing external hard drive

I am not sure what you mean by "crash".

There might be a problem if the disk was performing a write operation at the time of the OS crash, but the scope of the issue should be minor. Also, some disk utilities will complain if the filesystem on a drive is not unmounted gracefully (such as the OS shutting down, or "ejecting" the drive).

This isn't a disk, but a portable external hard drive. You just plug it in when you need it.

ditto to what drewdad said. When he said eject, he was referring (probably) to the unmounting process these drives do under normal circumstances. Data could be lost if the drive was in a write process when the crash occured (this would likely only expose the data that was in that process.) The graceful unmount insures that data in the process is written completely before being removed, "ejected," or shut down.

I agree with DrewDad... only much more emphatically.

It is extremely unlikely (similar to getting hit by lightening while a Shark is biting you on the day you win the lottery) that a crash in a computer will cause any data loss in an attached external hard drive.

Except, it is possible that a small amount of data that was written in the past couple of minutes might be lost (because sometimes the most recent data is cached on the computer).

But this doesn't constitute a crash in my mind.

Thank you all very much.