Topic: A clicking HDD is a dead HDD, right?

[Cobra951]

I've had the worst luck lately with electronic equipment.  My 360 RRoD'd, then the Time-Warner modem started dropping 40% of packets.  Those things got replaced, and now it seems I've lost an external drive.  I've had the thing for several years--4, I think.  It got a lot of heavy use, and it had my main download folder.  It now clicks, spins down, spins back up and clicks again.  I can't access it at all.  Damn it to hell.  Any chance a good whack would unstick whatever is stuck?  Just a thought.

I'm downright paranoid now.  I'm duplicating everything essential and irreplaceable to other physical drives, when I can think of what that may be.  Chances are I'll never catch everything.  Do the MTBF ratings equate to just a few years of continuous use?  God, if this happens to C: or D:, I'm really screwed.  My backup PC died catastrophically last year.  *Sigh*

[scottws]

Yeah a clicking drive is very bad.  If you want, you can download some diagnostic utility and see what's up, but it is almost certainly failing.

[Ghandi]

I had a drive that clicked for a good 6 months before it finally died. It wasn't bad at first, but it slowly got worse. At the end it would click for an eternity before it worked.

[Cobra951]

I would settle for that problem.  I have plenty of free space on another drive, and I could just copy everything over.  But no.  It's deader than a doornail.  It happened all of a sudden.  It happened when I was sitting right here, dealing with MS support about the problem with XBLA games not working offline on a different 360.  I couldn't believe it.  Shit of this magnitude usually happens one turd at a time.