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.

My mom's external HD had a problem where it stopped working properly (no clicking noises, and other HDs inside the enclosure work fine, so I'm a bit miffed). After opened it up I saw the drive was tagged as a "Recertified" drive, which makes me a little wary of buying externals made by other companies. I'd rather just buy my own internal and mount it up in an external bay myself.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I've owned 8 external hard drives of varying size over the years. I think that 6 of them were drive units, and the other 2 I put together myself with an internal drive and a case. I've only had one fail - a 400 gig unit about 4 years ago. The drive was getting heavy use in a hot room, but I can't say if that contribted to the failure.

But in my experience, external drives aren't any less reliable than internal ones. I'll be buying 1 or 2 new ones in the next couple of months, and I'll decommission my old ones to use as backups.

I wonder if "Recertified" drives are fixed the same way Miles fixed the GFF harddrive, which was just a problem with the controller circuitry. I can't imagine it's ever cost-effective to open up a drive to fix the internals. Still, I'd shy away from them.

Most amazing jew boots

What's the difference between a external drive and an internal drive mounted on an external usb bay anyway? I do have an external drive, and I haven't had any problems with for 2 years now. And I'm planning on getting a larger one for back-up and I'm choosing between an external or an internal mounted on an external bay.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

The difference is the supplier of said external casing. If you bought an external drive like the Seagate Freeagent, then Seagate gets money on the casing and the hard disk. Otherwise, your cash is split between the internal hard disk and external drive bay manufacturers...

How ya doing, buddy?

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.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?