What does one do when one's external hard drive is no longer recognized by one's PC? It's only producing the "clicks of death." All my music's on it.

one panics until one realizes one's hard drive just passed away and then one mourns one's loss of all one's music.

then one is relieved one has back-ups on disc and breaths a sigh of relief.... one has said back-ups, right?

You can send harddrives off to have data recovered if it's really worth it to you. I have no idea how much that costs, and there's no guarantee that you'll get everything or even anything back.

One has everything on discs but it's probably a weekend long effort to import everything again. Bummer.

This happened to me on my work computer's harddrive. No backups. DUMB

as a last resort, put it in the freezer for a few hours, then try accessing it. I've recovered data from otherwise dead drives this way.

Wow, interesting tip

if i were you i would breath deep and find your calm in knowing that there's much worse things than losing thousands of mp3s. most of these are just a google search away. replace them as you want to listen to them.

the internet rules.

if you don't have internet, then you can and should freak out.

always have AT LEAST triple redundancy

yeah im almost at triple redundancy. ive heard the freezer thing has worked before, but yeah its probably toast

i have no real redundancy. tempting fate. OH SHIT.

I don't have an external hard drive at all.
Looking to get one.
What's a good amount of storage, and what's a good price for that?
Anything that I need to look for as a cool feature, or as a warning sign?

I saw a 3TB drive at Best Buy today for $150, but looking at how much it is for less space on other hard drives (1.5 TB for $125 to 150), that makes me think that there might be something wrong with this one.
?

memory's cheap, don't overthink it todd.

Man, I would think a 2TB one would be just fine- that's a HELL of a lot of music, especially if you're doing mostly MP3s.

Find one that's on sale, go back home & do some research & buy it if it doesn't have a lot of bad reviews.

Easy peasy.

Actually, the larger the drive, the more likely it is to fail.

Storage space (not memory - different thing) is cheap, but trying to recover all of your shit after it's been lost on a failed drive is not cheap.

Redundancy is your best bet if you really want reliable back-up. But it's kind of expensive to get a Drobo or RAIDed HDs or use a cloud service, so I'd really say your best bet is to stick to smaller drives and back your stuff up on more than one.

just listen to vinyl, and have a few gigs of mp3s on your smartphone, and when you eventually drop it in the toilet, download a few different gigs of mp3s to switch it up.

that's why I got my laptop fitted with a massive internal drive...thinking about taking out the CD and putting in a solid state (once I can afford it, I can't even afford a mcdonalds burger)

/thread

I remember back when I had time to sit around and listen to records. Man, those were the days.

i know right? then i forced myself to make time, partly by not listening to music where i can't listen to a turntable. Putting on a record at dinner. That kind of thing.

I bought this western digital 2TB external hard drive about 3 months ago for $79 canadian.

Loaded all my music, pictures, movies and TV shows, documents... the whole lot, onto the thing. Took me a good couple days, on and off. Then on week 3 the thing fails. No longer can be read my laptop. I send it back and they send me a brand new one.

I load that one all up with the same things. Another couple days of backing up stuff. 3 days ago it slips off the couch and falls about one and a half feet, maybe two. Aaaaaaand.... it's Toast.

Round 3? Ugh.....

I'm new to the world of external hard drives and so far, I don't like what I've seen.

I guess with the third one, I'll just screw the bloody thing down to the god damn floor boards so it stays put.

I have half of a .75 TB drive filled with 1500 albums of mp3's, about 25 movies, and a backup of 10 years of digital photos.

i would be dead without the stuff i have on my drive, but its a 3TB GoFlex with Firewire connection so its pretty fast. I use half for my TimeCapsule to back up the 2TB iMac and the other half holds 2200 CDs ripped at FLAC, about 100 24bit vinyl rips.

Im afraid to touch the thing for fear of failure.

last year april my pc main harddrive died. took some photos and some computer software work i did. no backups. lost forever. really sucked.

luckily all my music was on a secondary hard-drive dedicated to just music.

You should get a Drobo.