I have a seagate backup plus 3tb usb 3.0
Well my four year old daughter knocked it off my desk and the power source on the bottom quit working. Being that i just recently finished my first desktop build and had extra space i thought no problem i will uncase it and use it internally. Well i was going to transfer some files first so i used a new converter a tech guy talked me into buying last week usb 2.0 ide/sata to connect it to pc first. When i connected there was some crackling and a little smoke. It was probably only plugged in for a total of 5 seconds at most. I am a college coach and i have 3 years worth of footage on this drive that is not duplicated anywhere else and is very very important to me. What do i do.

Can you post here a picture and specs of the converter? Asking because it is important in understanding better whether the current electric problem is because of the converter set up or because of the original failure and subsequent power on, or else, etc.

To maximize chances of data recovery it is always best to send the drive in to specialized data recovery company.

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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

The drive probably has a shorted TVS diode, most likely the 12V one.

See http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diode_FAQ.html

If you need to replace the board, then you will need to transfer the serial flash memory chip from patient to donor. Some PCB suppliers provide such a service for free. The total cost should not exceed US$50.

However, Seagate's 3TB external drives are configured with sector sizes of 4096 bytes rather than 512 bytes. This means that you cannot install these drives internally and expect to have access to your data in the normal way.

Worse still, if your drive was spinning at the time of the fall, then it will most likely have suffered internal physical damage.

See download/file.php?id=7003

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A backup a day keeps DR away.