Burnt out external hard drive

could of been either but in a case like this should have disconnected a device such as that when your powering a computer off and on like that. its like how you can damage an internal hard drive by shutting down your computer by using the switch on your PSU all the time

If you turned off the computer by pulling the plug then you can damage the hard drive, however if you shut down properly by using the shutdown icon then it was either coincidence or you had a bad hard drive that could have failed at any time.

Older hard drives had heads which physically contacted the disk surface when they were spun down - they were typically rated for about 50,000 start/stop cycles. That equates to about 13 years if you did 10 power cycles a day. Another 6 or 7 power cycles wouldn't make any significant difference.

More modern drives have loading ramps and the head is retracted beyond the edge of the disk surface when the drive spins down. Those drives typically don't have a start/stop rating, only a MTBF (mean time between failure).

So you feel it is purely a coincidence?

So was it a coincidence or did it cause the crash?

Well if the drive was marginal then a lot of power cycling could have contributed to it's demise. But if it was that marginal then it probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway.

So basically, yeah - I think it's pretty much coincidence.

Okay, thanks for you insight.