Already answered above by: lcoughey

And by digisupport:

And you even agreed

Then you heard it again from pcimage:

And from labtech:

And its still not enough ?
So, if IUIC everything said above is not what you wanna hear ?!
Then I'll give you what you wanna hear, and there you have it:
Everything said above is BS, you can connect the donor,a nd play around with the drive, until all your DATA will be grind to dust.
Happy now ?!

This case developing like many, many others.

Data was not lost as the drive failed or when it was dropped.

Data was destroyed in 5 minutes by the user and / or well meaning tech people trying to help getting data back.

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Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

I'm simply asking questions so I can learn something, in addition to my own research. Don't be a jerk.

Thanks Fzabkar! I appreciate it.

Hah! Sounds like deja vu all over again. And again. And again.

Well, considering it is my drive, I can tell you with certainty that a. it hasn't left the desk where it sits in a long time, and that I personally haven't dropped throughout that time. Before that, I honestly don't remember. Do you think that dropping it a year or so ago could potentially cause the problem I'm having now so far down the road?

And right now, I'm reading, researching, and thinking of my options. I haven't decided to mess around with it, or open it up without a clean room, or stick it in a freezer and hope it starts working, etc etc etc. Simply trying to figure out my options, and which ones are worth it to pursue.

I think it could. Drive could get slight media damage in unused area and it turns to the problem when drive started use this area or if it found problem in this area and started to try to remap bad sectors.

Makes sense...thanks drHDD!

More likely something happened recently (you moved drive while it was working or something like this).

Possibly. But every single time I clean my table, first thing I do is disconnect my hard drives and place them on another table away from the cleaning area. And I don't that too frequently so I definitely remember not dropping the drive. But...who knows???

As you said, its your drive and also your decision what to do, np. My advise: Find a pro in your area, get your drive analyzed and you will know what's wrong.
Then you can still decide what to do. You are the only one who can validate if data is important or not.

_________________
Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

Thanks digisupport. I appreciate it!

So, I finally took the enclosure apart and snapped the photo of the PCB. Does something not look right, or is it just me?

Looks normal.
Worried about the bit of oxidation you see on there? It is more or less common.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Yeah, that's quite a bit of oxidation. But nothing looks burnt or damaged otherwise...

The bridge IC is a JMS538S, so it appears that the bridge handles the encryption. Anyway, that's a moot point since your drive is clicking.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I agree with this, we have had several instances where we have asked the client if the drive had been dropped.

Of course they immediately say no, but when pressed they often admit that it "may" have been dropped sometime ago, but didn't think it would be relevant as it still worked afterwards.

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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pcimage, how can you tell the ROM chip in the board above that I posed? Thanks!

Probably you will laugh but it's U12.

No...I actually didn't laugh. My days of building prototype circuit boards made sure I didn't laugh.

So, if my PCB is bad indeed, then I should swap the ROM chip from my old drive onto the donor drive, eh? Reason why I ask is that years ago when I lost two identical hard drives, I found a third one with the same PCB. I swapped the PCB and it actually worked! I was able to salvage the data off the hard drives. But from what I've read, I got lucky, because just swapping PCBs from identical drives won't work most of the time.

I am 99.99% certain that a PCB swap will be a fruitless waste of time and money.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!