I Killed My External Drive

xWonderboyx

So I have this Seagate external drive. It's the FreeAgent Desktop. 500 gigs and all that. I was using it to share lots of video and music throughout my home so my wife and I had access to things from our laptops. It was on pretty much all the time in a well ventilated part of the desk.

Today we bought a fancy pants new desk at Ikea. We put that bastard together and when that was done it was time to transfer the contents of the old desk to the new desk. My first step was to start unplugging things willy nilly and get crackin' at making things pretty. When everything got put back into place I went to access the drive remotely and noticed I couldn't find it on my network. I went up to it and noticed a whirring and then a click. This noise occurs about every second.

Did I kill my drive and is there any way to get the info off of it? Nothing was really important but there was a bunch of things on there that I enjoyed immensely (Venture Brothers NOOOOOOOOO!)

Lord Jezo

I had a click once on my hard drive.

Never was able to fix it.

You could try freezing it, it's a a pretty last ditch effort but it's better than nothing.

Example:
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

Since then I have bought a 1TB hard drive and keep backups of all my data, losing all of my stuff was a pain in the ass that I don't want to go through again.

But it's a Seagate, should have a 5 year warranty (less on external drives?), so at least you can get a new one.

xWonderboyx

Lord Jezo wrote: »

I had a click once on my hard drive.

Never was able to fix it.

You could try freezing it, it's a a pretty last ditch effort but it's better than nothing.

Example:
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

Since then I have bought a 1TB hard drive and keep backups of all my data, losing all of my stuff was a pain in the ass that I don't want to go through again.

But it's a Seagate, should have a 5 year warranty (less on external drives?), so at least you can get a new one.

The thing is, this hard drive also served as backup to our other computers. It's really shitty if the backup fucking fails. My next desktop I'm RAIDing the fuck out of it.

Stregone

If you are using an external drive as a backup only turn it on when you are backing up to/from it. Constant usage like streaming music and video from it heat it up quite a bit. Heat is bad for hard drives and will definitely cause them to fail sooner.

If you do go through with making a RAID array to replace it, consider using two different brand drives in it. Identical drives in identical conditions tend to fail around the same time, making the RAID a little pointless.