I’d start by generating some synthetic workloads such as writing some sequential data to it and then reading it back a few times.
badblocks concerns partial failure of the device where (usually) just a few blocks misbehave while the rest remains accessible. The failure mode seen here is that the entire drive becomes inaccessible and it’s likely not due to the drive itself but how it’s connected.
If synthetic loads fail to reproduce the error, I’d put a filesystem on it and copy over some real data perhaps. Put on some load that mimics a real system somehow to try and get it to fail without the OS actually being ran off the drive.