Anyone know what to do with a failed external hard drive?
olefoo: You could try taking it out of it's housing and using another housing. But that is only worth trying if it's a failure of the electronics, not of the drive itself.Since you mention downthreaed that's it's making click+grind noises... It sounds like it's dead.Freezing a drive of any vintage more recent than Y2k is less than useful. Older drives were built to looser tolerances and thermal shrink could actually move the drive head off the platter. More recent drives aren't going to be dealt w/ that way, and freezing the drive can cause condensation in places you don't want condensation.Unless your data is worth considerably more than $10k, don't bother with drive recovery services since you will in all probability be wasting your money.