Hello everyone,
I am new to this forum and am hoping for some advice regarding an external drive problem. I have a 2TB Western Digital Elements drive from 2019 which stopped working recently.
When it failed it had been in use for about 15 to 20 minutes then suddenly it stopped responding.
When I unplugged it I noticed that the exterior of its casing had become very hot, far hotter than could be considered normal. After giving it a few hours to cool off I tried plugging it’s USB cable back into the laptop in order to see if it would do anything.
It is no longer recognised by the laptop (running Windows 10) but the external light on the drive did come on. The motor could be heard spinning for a short time at first then the drive made 4 or 5 clicks and the motor stopped. It then just sat there silently with the light still on but did not get hot.
Most of the data on the drive is already backed up but not all unfortunately. The questions I have therefore are what has most likely gone wrong with this drive and what would it’s chances of a successful repair or data recovery be?

Any advice will be much appreciated.
Thanks

Likely one or more heads have failed. Think of this as self-test. If it fails it will try a few times and then spin down.
Recovery is likely possible, but mechanical DR jobs can be expensive.

This ^

Spin click and spindown likely heads. Clean room job and you wont get much change out of 500 quid Im afraid.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

Thanks for the responses, very useful. I will just need to have a think now about whether that lost data justifies the probably quite high cost of recovery.

Next time make redundant backups

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Orico DS500C3-US-BK 5-disk 3.5" SATA, iTGZ 4x M.2 2280 Thunderbolt enclosure NVMe/SATA, etc. etc.