[Jeffery Mewtamer]

Okay, so the 1 TB external Hard drive my seed box uses for storing the files it seeds(because it doesn't have enough internal storage and lacks any SATA ports), is no longer being recognized by either the seed box or the netbook that serves as my primary workstation. When set-up, it hums as one would expect and makes an audible clicking that can also be felt if I place my hand to the drive enclosure. Not sure if the drive itself is going bad or just the power supply on the drive going bad, but either way, I think I need a new drive.

Fortunately, little, if anything of importance exists solely on that drive as it wasn't my primary external drive, but my primary external drive isn't suited to being used as a replacement as my primary drive is USB powered and my seed box is too old and decrepit to power it reliably(more often than not, hooking up my primary drive to my seed box just produces a similar clicking, hence my suspicion the the failure of the old drive is power related and not the drive inself).

So, I'm in the market for either a internal PATA drive or an external USB drive that's good with older hardware and has a dedicated power supply. Either way, I need a drive that won't buckle under being used 24/7 for seeding torrents, and while 1 TB would sufficient, I would like 2TB so I have enough room to make a copy of everything on my primary external drive. I'm on a budget and don't care about portability or aesthetics so a physically bulky drive is fine if it's significantly cheaper than a more compact drive of similar capacity and performance.

I find that most online stores aren't very screen reader friendly, so an Amazon.com product link to recommended drives would be appreciated.

[Meat Miracle]

Remove the drive from the external storage and hook it up with SATA. Most of those things use a cheap sata->usb converter, and those will fail to read the drive on the first filesystem error. Hook it up natively and there will be a good chance you can see the drive and make backups of it.

The old WD Reds used to be the best drives, but the newer ones are not as good, and they are phasing out those as well. WD Greens are decent for the price, just disable head parking (or set it to the highest value).

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

Did try removing the drive from it's enclosure and hooking it up internally, but I got a bad superblock error trying to mount it and it gives the same clicking sound. Ended up ordering a Phantom Drives Greendrive3 2TB whcih should arrive tomorrow. Going to be a nusance copying roughly a TB and a half from my backup drive though.

[Overlord]

Be grateful you had a backup. I nearly lost a month's worth of data this evening due to a power surge temporarily not letting my PC see the primary HDD (it appears to just have been a one-off glitch, thank christ). I'm running a manual backup to my external as we speak.

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

At most, I've lost a few untested partimage backups of my Seedbox's root filesystem, which are primarily so I don't have to do a clean install and spend hours removing my Linux Distro's bundled crapware every time I break my system and can't fix it and a few recently downloaded episodes of Precure. Still, I'm glad I kept the recently failed drive around instead of chucking it when it no longer met my storage needs as having it around for a work drive allowed me to have my primary backup on a drive that is only used when I need to add files to the archive or restore from backup.

Still not looking forward to having to do a cp -R on over a terabyte of data, especially with how my set-up means I cn't leave text-mode while cp or mv are working in the background.