External Hard Drive Suddenly Loaded With Corrupt Image Files (Mac User)

I'm using an iMac with CS6. I have an external Maxtor 1TB drive that is 13 months old. I have had no issues at all with it until today, when I attempted to access  a PSD file from the drive and received an error message telling me that the document was not a valid photoshop file. I looked at the directory at this point and noticed that the preview icons for many of the photoshop and jpg files on the drive were disabled. In each of these cases, the files will not open.
I have:
1. Repaired permissions and volumes on the external drive.
2. Changed the file extension and attempted to open.
3. Opened the file in a hex editor and looked for extra lines of code, or text, or whatever.
4. Copied the file to a different drive.
5. Attempted to open in a different program (Preview, Illustrator)
In no cases will the files open, and I'm stumped. The drive itself seems to be working fine. Not every file is affected, and the files that are affected are both in a variety of locations on the drive and were created over a period of years. Any ideas about how to resolve this issue will be sincerely appreciated.

thx1138b wrote:
I looked at the directory at this point and noticed that the preview icons for many of the photoshop and jpg files on the drive were disabled. In each of these cases, the files will not open.
In no cases will the files open. The drive itself seems to be working fine.
If you open the folder in Bridge and the thumbnails just show icons try purging the cache.  Go to Tools/cache/purge cache for xxxx folder.  Let thumbs rebuild and if you still have just icons for those problem files I would say the drive is not working fine.
The problem may be intermittent, but I would have very little faith in it.  See if you can find other programs to test the drive for bad segements and read/write operations. 
If you put files on this drive also put the same file on another drive at the same time until you get this figured out.  Drive failure is not the uncommon.

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