Question My external HDD is making weird clicking noises.

[Xavi. S.L]

As the title says; my external HDD is making weird clicking noises.
It came from my old PC and I've been using it for 2 months now and there hasn't been a single problem with it until now. This is what it's been doing. I had to pick it apart to see what was wrong, but my inexperienced eye wasn't enough to see it, unfortunately.

Hoping any of you could tell me what's wrong and if my data can be saved.

 

[Nemesia]

Well opening your HDD was the nail in the coffin if it was still working. You should know that when experts do data recovery they open HDD in a CLEAN ROOM like you see in movies. These clean room have mega air filtration system so that nothing in the air can settle on the HDD platters. Like dust particles, dead skin cells etc.

Data recovery center doesn't even accept a drive that has been opened outside of a clean room. They consider these drive already dead.

If the data is still accessible please do backup of your files you don't wanna lose if you have any and just know that if you have issues retrieving the data it's probably because of all the contamination you probably exposed your platters to.

 

[Xavi. S.L]

Well opening your HDD was the nail in the coffin if it was still working. You should know that when experts do data recovery they open HDD in a CLEAN ROOM like you see in movies. These clean room have mega air filtration system so that nothing in the air can settle on the HDD platters. Like dust particles, dead skin cells etc.

Data recovery center doesn't even accept a drive that has been opened outside of a clean room. They consider these drive already dead.

If the data is still accessible please do backup of your files you don't wanna lose if you have any and just know that if you have issues retrieving the data it's probably because of all the contamination you probably exposed your platters to.

Oh <Mod Edit> lmao.
It was already pretty inaccessible, it wasn't responding but it was detectable.
And my laptop still detects it, which is good(?)

Good thing there was nothing really important on there other than some games and videos I luckily have saved on the cloud.