firewire disk failure

[Ryan Clancey]

about a month ago, i bought a maxtor external firewire disk.  it worked
great for the majority of that time.  today, though, it appears to have
failed quite spectacularly.  my machine was hung, and after rebooting, i
ran fsck on the disk, and got the following error:

(da0:sbp0:0:0:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 08 cb 24 95 0 0 1 0
(da0:sbp0:0:0:0): CAM Status: SCSI Status Error
(da0:sbp0:0:0:0): SCSI Status: Check Condition
(da0:sbp0:0:0:0): MEDIUM ERROR asc:4b,0
(da0:sbp0:0:0:0): Data phase error
(da0:sbp0:0:0:0): Retrying Command (per Sense Data)

repeated 5 times, then a bunch of fsck filesystem errors.  rinse,
lather, repeat, ad nauseum.

my question is this: what is the most likely culprit?  the kernel (5.1),
the disk, the enclosure, or the firewire card (d-link dfb-a5)?  has
anyone had problems with any of these components?  my concern is, which
one needs to be replaced?  the disk most certainly, but i don't want to
do that and find it failing again next month.

thanks for any input.
-ryan clancey