I've been using Iomega external hard drives up till now, but one of them has started clicking, and isn't recognised by my PC. I'm gonna try and see if I can back it up, but are there any better brand hard drive that I can go for - ones that will be more reliable?

I personaly like WD/Seagate..omega kinda noisy and Hitachi mini, no go with window 7 PC.

OK, my hard drive is not being recognised by my comp, and is constantly clicking when I plug it in. I've got closed to 900GB of stuff on here - any way of recovering it?

Constantly clicking is a sign of hardware failure, I've had this happen to HDDs in the past (few years ago certain IBM/Hitachi drives dubbed the 'Deathstar' were notoriously failing like this). There's no way to recover the data once this happens unless you send it to hard drive repairs specialist who might charge you few hundreds pounds for the privilege.

You can try this; put the drive in a cool place (even a fridge) for a while then try and see what you can copy of it - copy what's essential first as soon as it heats up it will start clicking again and fail eventually - unlikely to recover 900gb of data but you might get some vital files of it.

Ali

Exactly Ali bhaii, that clicking clunker was hitachi and is on it's way back already:)

I've been using Western Digital drives for both internal and external along with Hitachi Deskstars.

One of the 1.5 TB Western Digital Elements drives failed on me. But i have several of these along with their "My Books". Hitachi is no longer the deathstar it once was dubbed. That's Seagate now. lol Hitachi is a good value. Best value would be a Windows Home Server though!

My failed drive still has the data on it. No Clicking or noises. Recognized and indexed by Win 7 or XP, but slow read/write rates and file transfers.....slow to the point the transfer doesn't complete. it'll say transfer rate 0.0000000000000001/kb/s. Still recoverable?

I've had good luck with Seagate and G-Tech external hard drives.

Seagate and western digital