Help! my usb hard drive is deleting files on its own

I use both windows and linux.

I have an 200gig external hd that i store files on.

The drive has dropped 3 times in the year I've had it nothing big most from the bed to a carpeted floor.

It never acted up from those incident.

Recently it became unplugged while "on" and I did not know until I came back about 3 hours later so I turned it off plugged it in and started it and from them on instead of the split second boot it now takes at least 3 to 5 mins to boot the light stays on red for all that time before switching to green.
But it was still working fine.

Today however it started spasming on its own. The red light would come on for no reason and stay on for a few minutes as the hard drive whirled.

It did that a couple of times I turned it off both times then turned it back on and it booted quick like before.

But I noticed inside my picture folder 4 folders were deleted on its own. One folder was renamed by itself and 2 folders stayed the same.
One folder had 8 thousand pictures in it and the other 3 had about 30 to 200 pictures in them individually.

I then closed it and rebooted into windows and now my entire picture directory is empty all the folders have been deleted. But my hard drive still has the size counted against it.

Is my external going bad? Is there anyway I can recover the files that were deleted?

I've never heard of a drive deleting its own files but this one is.