Mavericks will read my external drive but not write to it

I have a Mac Mini ( late 2012) and have the latest version of Mavericks running. I am using an external drive for backing up my photos. About 4 months ago I received an error message that the backup failed and to check the drive using the disk management utility. I checked it using the repair function and it stated all partitions looked ok, there is only one partition. But in order to get it to work again I erased the drive and formatted again. Once complete I set the drive back up using Time Machine. All was good for a few months and then it started all over again. Now after I erase and reset up it only runs for a few backups and then  starts with the error messages again.
I am able to read from my hard drive so believe it's defective but I'm not a technical person so don't know for sure. Has anybody else experienced tis? If so were you able to correct it? and ow did you correct it?
Thx.

Thanks to you and all who responded. The majority of responders indicated that the drive was failing. I ran the disk utility again (umpteenth time ) and it said the same thing, nothing was wrong. But I figured the masses couldn't be wrong so I found another External drive to backup to and so far so good. However this happened before as well when after a few weeks it stopped writing to it. So for now all is well and hopefully it will remain this way.
Thx again to all.

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