External hard drive empty, no disk and unreadable.

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thedude300

thedude300

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Jul 10, 2011
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As the title states I have a external hard drive I use for storage of movies. I use it to play mainly on the PS3. Recently, I plugged in my hard drive to the PS3 and it failed to notice it was there. So, I plugged it into my computer and it is instantly recognized and given a driver letter but it is completely empty. It doesn't even say how much space is on the hard drive or any information other than it's connected to the computer.The hard drive is grey and now called a "Removable Disk" and when I attempt to do anything to it. It will now say "Please Insert a disk to drive". In the disk management it shows up but will not allow a format

I wish to save it and recover my files and do a format of the drive as I have hundreds of movies on the hard drive I really wish not to lose as I don't have a full back up saved. I attempted to scan through these forums and find solutions and tried a program called Recuva but it fails to recognize the hard drive completely.
 
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Pinhedd

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Aug 7, 2007
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It's gone dude. Just start ripping your legally owned videos to a new one. Other than that, we can't really help you recover "copies"
 
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thedude300

thedude300

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Jul 10, 2011
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So it straight up is done and has just died with age? I mean it is a older hard drive and I can accept a few loses I have a back of most of them just not a pretty good chunk of recent.. my poor internet usage.


Anyway, as a side question then. For external hard drives what are the best brands to buy and best to stick away from?
 
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Tom Tancredi

Tom Tancredi

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Toshiba and Sony made some decent ones, but I don't know if they are repacked into external drive cases. Seagate is meh and often has alot of fail among the good, Maxthon sucks the worst in drives I always found over the decades. Realistically it doesn't matter if you get a 'great drive' or not, one good power surge/drop/malware/virus/etc. and BOOM still lost it all. Always have a backup. For example I have a old TB 3.5 Drive, I use as my son's main drive, but I took part of the drive and put a backup of my 2.5 external HDD I use all the time to it. So incase when I plug / unplug the drive something happens or worse I have to get a new drive, then there is a backup of the data. Reversely if something happens to my son's PC, well I have my external to copy from to the replacement drive on his PC and I have a backup all over again.
 
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thedude300

thedude300

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Oh, I'm for sure going to have back ups now that are up to date. For hard drives, could I actually get a better more reliable and probably cheaper hard drive by just buying a internal hard drive and just throw it on a external hard drive casing? I already have a USB 3.0 case for hard drive to become external because my original casing broke at the power source and I was able to get my hard drive going again with a external case.
 
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Pinhedd

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3.5 inch hard disk drives use a 12 volt supply for the spindle motor, but 2.5 inch hard disk drives use only 5 volts. So while a 3.5 inch enclosure will always require a 12 volt supply, a sufficiently low speed 2.5 inch drive can be operated by coupling the output power of two USB ports.
 
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