With almost 20 years working with hard drives this is the first failed drive that cannot be recovered. Ironically, it is the newest and least used of them all. This drive contained no more than about 25 large BluRay ISOs which were all written once. Once the disk was filled, it was never written to again and was probably never read more than ten or twenty times. ALL the files were contiguous leaving 0% fragmentation.

As far as backups are concerned, I still have all the BluRay disks but what a pain (a) finding out which ones were lost and (b) ripping them all ... ugh!

It should be recoverable fairly easy. Just not with conventional software based tools.

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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

@jaja0714, you still haven't shown us the SMART report. Your initial posts suggest that your drive has logical problems (file system corruption), but your latest post suggests physical problems of some kind. If it is a logical issue, then you could clone your drive with ddrescue and work on the clone with a variety of tools, eg PhotoRec (freeware) or DMDE (US$20). At the moment there appears to be a read problem of some kind. That's why I have asked that you eliminate the USB-SATA bridge.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.