Question My sony HDD not detecting

[Dhanush Hcs]

Sony HD-E1 External hard disk drive.

Hi, I have sony HDD which is about 3 years now. It was fine until from past week it stops working. Means the external hard drive when connected shows up with light on but not showing in my computer. Initially I thought it was cable problem and replaced with new, but the problem still persists. It is not been detected in device manager also. Please help me to solve this problem as I have many pictures in it.


Help

 

[PC Tailor]

Are you able to try it on another PC?

 

[Dhanush Hcs]

Nope, I have a laptop and a Sony television which don't work with both now. Earlier it used to work with television as well, but now it's not detected in both either.

 

[PC Tailor]

If it used to work on both, but not anymore there is every possibility the drive has failed.

When I come across these, usually I'll end up taking the hard drive out of the enclosure and plugging it directly via SATA into a PC and seeing if I can access it that way. It could simply be the enclosure circuitboard has failed in some way.

 

[Dhanush Hcs]

Is this good or bad? Can it be fixed and be used as before ?

 

[PC Tailor]

If it has failed to the point where it can no longer be detected on any device. Then you'd need specialist recovery engineers to grab the data off of it. If you can get it detected by taking it out of the enclosure and using SATA interface directly in the PC, then you should be able to backup the data.

 

[Dhanush Hcs]

Maybe should I take it to the Sony service centre and get it done, as I'm not familiar with doing myself.

 

[Dhanush Hcs]

I had maintained it like a brand new HDD and regular scanning with antivirus. Inspite of this how can it happen and what is the cause?

 

[PC Tailor]

On external hard drives, usually the enclosure is the first thing that fails, not the hard drive.

So it could just be the small circuitboard inside the enclosure that has failed, which is why if you take it out and install it via SATA, you'd be able to see if the Hard drive is at fault, or the enclosure.

There is no guarantee that I'm correct that it's a failure somewhere, but if its worked absolutely fine on multiple devices until now, then all of a sudden it isn't being detected, then it's more probable that either the enclosure circuitboard has failed, or the hard drive has.

The circuitboard can fail for many reasons, but can quite often be that they are cheap parts that have a shorter lifetime, hard drives can fail ultimately as they have moving parts and have a lifespan. They usually only last so many read/writes, but ultimately they can fail for a variety of reasons outside of your direct control.

They can also experience problems if they've ever been disconnected from a computer incorrectly (as the moving parts will suddenly halt causing data loss or sometimes the head can crash for example).

 

[Dhanush Hcs]

So, what are the probabilities that can be done be me? Like going to service center as I'm experiencing this for the first time, I can't do this myself. What I'm gonna do?😪