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Buffer I/O error on device sdb1

Hi,

I have an external usb disk connected to a Debian desktop. A couple of days ago these messages started appearing in dmesg

Code:

[154343.010908] EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=14352940, block=57409572

[154343.014425] EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): ext3_find_entry: reading directory #13272620 offset 0

[154343.014913] EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): ext3_find_entry: reading directory #3440641 offset 0

[154343.022172] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 53138974

[154343.022209] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1

[154343.022218] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 53138976

[154343.022252] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1

[154343.022256] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 53138977

When this appears the disk becomes unavailable and I have to remove and plug it in and mount again. After that it works couple of hour and then the problem appears again. Is this a hardware problem?

Thanks for helping

I suggest to unmount the hard disk and run a fsck on it. Probably some blocks are damaged and may be repaired by running a file system check.
If the I/O problems persists then the hard disk is probably dying and I strongly recommend to make backups before you will lose data.

After unmounting and running fsck the problem appears again in couple of hours. The disk seems to be really dying.