Question My Hard Drive just spontaneously died on me

[Vozenger]

Hi, yesterday afternoon I was using my PC like any other day, it ain't nothing special, just a normal office-like system. Out the blue, I had a BSOD and it inmediataly shut down, afterwards, it showed me the usual "Select a proper boot option or connect one and press a key" or something along those lines, this has already happened to me before and all I had to do is go into the BIOS and select my hard drive as main boot again, problem is, BIOS said the sata port was empty, as if nothing was connected to it (while my HDD obviously was).

I tried reconnecting it and even tried a different SATA cable, but it still didn't get recognized.

This HDD also makes a little noise every time I turned on my pc, but now it didn't.

Fast forward to today, I turned it on again and it did recognize the hard drive for a second, I even got to the Windows loading screen, but after a bit it shut down again and didn't recognize it anymore.

For context this a good old Western Digital Blue 500GB 7200RPM, just your average HDD

I'm already looking into buying a new one, a SATA ssd even, but I don't really want to lose this hard drive since I hold a lot of emotion to it, there's really nothing important on it, but sure lots of stuff that I wouldn't really like to re-download all over again.

 

[USAFRet]

Drives die.
Eventually, all of them.
Starting from Day 1 out of the box, they are on a slow march to the grave.
Often, they die with no warning.


Sentimental value? Emotion? For the physical drive?
That is like being attached to a toothbrush.
When it is worn out, it is done.

Just like this HDD.

Done.