I believe the drive is toast and not worth sending to an expensive hard drive recovery service.

Much of the data is already backed up and/or can be replaced. There are some older reference files, notes and programming dating back several decades, rarely used, that would be more difficult to reproduce, find or replace.

The drive makes a continual faint (periodic) noise for approx. one second pulse.

That can be heard only if held closely to your ear. Almost like a buzzer, when listen to closely it sounds as if the drive platter mechanisms attempt to turn the platters that are unable to spin.

The backup drive is installed in an external usb & sata enclosure.

The drive was taken out and connected to another usb / sata drive adapter and makes the same sound without spinning up.

This drive wasn't used on a regular basis, mainly as a backup drive for programming storage and reference files.

Sounds like a faulty drive mechanism, however I was wondering if the problem might possible be the drives circuit board?

sounds like stiction where the head is stuck to the platter surface. or even a stuck spindle. a data recovery lab only job really.if you don't really want data then this is good because if I am right, then not a DIY... apart from the much hated "percussive maintenance" where a sharp tap on a desk might free the head, but also may kill the drive.

Almost certainly stuck spindle, rarely see stiction on these drives.

Definitely not DIY

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Thanks for the replies.

From what I have read about hd repair, I don't think I would want to attempt to perform a repair that requires specialized tools, skill, knowledge, clean room, etc. Only if a repair could be accomplished without opening the case. Such as a circuit board replacement i.e. if one is able to find a replacement board.

Hard drives have come a long ways. Years ago I remember people programming operating systems to access hard and floppy drives for PCs. Cost was typically around ~$1500.00 for five megabytes of hard drive space.

Costs have come down quite a bit but the size of the drives has exceeded the size of common backup media. It has become more difficult and more expensive to backup unless you keep a secondary drive to backup the primary backup drive or a raid type installation.

There are 1Tb usb drives but I am not sure how reliable the newer usb stick are. In the past I have them fail periodically, seemed to be overly sensitive after making connections from a PC.

I am not sure if ther is a question here, but yes you are right with what you have said. It has always been true that you won't know how reliable a certain device is until you put it into service and find out. Many people say they have issues with a certain device, and if you read a forum with 10 or 20 "me too" "these WD enclosures are rubbish" etc etc.. it can appear that there is a tidal wave of bad devices out there.. UNTIL you realise how many MILLIONS of these devices are actually sold. a few tens or a hundred out of a few million is pretty good in my view.

as for backing up, yes it is hard, but the issue is that people think it is TOO hard, and dont backup.

If you have a simple look at it, buy more backup capacity than what you have for usage storage, and backup the files at an interval that matches how often these change, and the importance of the changes. REALLY simple but the amount you need these days is a cost factor, and hardware to run the backups can mirror your actual working setup.

Look at it like you want to travel through a large desert in a 4WD that you own. now you would not leave injust the car and take no sparetyre, no spare hoses or extra fuel, camping supplies, sat phone etc etc.. yes you can complain that you will spend more money on spares and emergency supplies than your actual car, but this is life unfortunately. If you want to save, maybe you will sacrafice vehicle spares and spend more on just supplies to eat, drink, a phone and wait for help, or maybe you will take a team of mechanics, extra vehicles.

back to the computer.. the sheer number of files mean that typically we have so many files, there are too many to manually go through and see what are critical, important, nice to keep but can re-download, or dont care. This gives an overall feeling of wanting to not really lose anything, but a feeling of being overwhelmed, and the backup never gets going.

Add to the mix phones, tablets, laptops, PCs, DVR devices like TV's that record and you now have different systems to try and backup.

Then you have the added technicalities such as was the backup successful, have we tested it on a device or all devices? did we really backup everything we thout we did, did we backup in a good enough timeframe etc. And the last point is that the PC and general usage, the idea of what file systems and filetypes, size, data in general is being abstracted away from the user and they are instead presented with such annoying and technically useless terms like "user experience". people believe that documents are "in word" or that they have a picture "in a dog album" or that the picture on instagram is also save in their phone, on their PC in 4 places, backed up on 20 instagram servers, in 20 of their friends temporary internet files folders, and a dozen people they dont know have it on their systems. the thought that the webpage is actually just a text file linking to the picture, is not considered.

simply put, people do not understand DATA at a root level, so managing it is now very hard.

I was sort of disappointed the serial drive failing early without warning. It could have at least produce some errors before going south.

I also use a SCSI SCA backplane server with an array of smaller swappable drives, some of the files could have been copied over to, but was over confident the serial drive would last a while longer.

SCSI is usually reliable if you have good cabling. Many of the problems with SCSI is due from poor cabling, improper termination and placement of the SCSI devices along the cable(s).