Extenal hard drives unreliable?

I recently bought a 1.5TB Seagate Freeagent Desk external hard drive. I got this to back up all my data on my PC to reformat my PC. Now everything was working fine until today just when I decide to format my PC today. As I connect my extenal hard drive to my PC it'll detect it and all but after a few second the hard drive starts to make a clicking sound and I'm not able to open any files, it pretty much disconnects itself. At first I thought it was my computer but the same thing happens when I connect it to my PS3 as well. So there goes my 240gb of data lost.

Now are external hard drives really unrealiable? I would read customer reviews left on newegg or some other online store on these external hard drives and there would always be at least one or two negative review on how it stopped working after a few days. I always thought they were just bitching because they got a faulty product now the same thing has happened to me as well. So are they really that bad? Is this common with extenal hard drives? Is there any way I can recover my files back to my desktop before I return this extenal hard drive? I haven't tried connecting it back to my PC since the PC is in the process of installing Windows XP now but I'm sure I'll have the same problem.

I hope Best Buy will give me a full refund without any rstocking fees.


Edit: My computer just finished installing XP. Now being desperate to get all my files back from this external hard drive I try it again. This time I noticed I got a "Delayed Write Failed" error so wondering what it is since I never got that error before I google it and ended up on microsofts support page and they suggested turning write caching off. So I go to do that but it's already turned off on the external hard drive so instead I turn it on. Now when I'm transfering my files over to my computer I'm not having any problems nor is there a clicking sound comming from this external hard drive. Could that have been the problem? If so then why was it working all these days and then suddenly getting this problem today? I'm gonna return it no matter what just to be on the safe side but my question still remains. Are external hard drives reliable at all?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I guess it must have been just me having a bad one. Oh well, I got an internal one just to be on the safe side, it's a 1tb one which was obviously cheaper.

There's nowhere I can't reach.