2 tb seagate expansion drive appears to have died - file recovery question

[Tinkmaster Overspark]

So my mass storage solution was pretty budget to say the least. It was a 2 TB seagate external hard drive that required a USB port (with the SHORTEST usb cable i have ever dealt with, extremely unpleasant) and its own power point needed. Its a few years old and its died, windows comes up with "does not recognise device" when i plug it in regardless of slot.

There's nothing absolutely mission critical on there, its just archives of shows, movies, music etc and like 700gb of steam games. The drive had 1.81 TB usable and i was using about 1.3 TB of it. How do i recover this data? Its not like i can't live with the loss but it'd be a lot more convenient to just get my things back..

Ive had issues with the drive in the past, definitely never going near seagate again.

Also - what do you reccomend i go with for mass storage instead. i happen to have an actual income now versus back years ago when i got the seagate. From what i've seen i can go with WD Reds in a RAID format within my computer (tbh this is kind of harder, my computer doesn't like HDDs, corsair air 540 is built for SSDs but i happen to have a very large game library and download a lot of things so it would be prohibitively expensive to go pure SSD). a single large WD black or some other solution?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Tinkmaster Overspark,

How is the drive recognized in Disk Management?
Apart from that, you can try uninstalling your USB controllers. Attaching the drive to another computer with a different USB cable might be a good idea as well.
If the problem persists, you may want to consider attaching the drive internally and see whether it will get recognized correctly.(you should check out whether the model is hardware encrypted though. If it is, you shouldn't take it out of the enclosure). If there is something wrong with the partitions and file format, you should use some kind of recovery software: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
Regarding your second question, I would say that RAID 1 option is a good one for redundancy. You can either set it up inside your computer or buy an external DAS with 2HDDs in RAID 1. The first option tends to be more reliable, though the second one is separated from the computer(in case something happens with the computer your data will be preserved).

Cheers,
D_Know_WD