I bought two refurbished 12 TB Seagate HDDs, installed one in my server, put the other in a USB adapter, plugged it into the server, and then let it rot there until I would eventually decide to tackle the burden of doing backups. Well, I decided that the time had come, but when I tried to mount it, I couldn’t find it. It is not detected using fdisk, but I can see it with dmesg, and it is stuck at Spinning up disk... (see [1]). But that is not all: the most frightening thing is that it makes very faint clicking sounds.
Do you think it is broken and I need to get a new one, or am I just missing something? Also, is this adapter bad, or why did it break while doing essentially nothing but sitting around? (The adapter is the SABRENT EC-DFLT-DE)
[1]:
[16073.604900] usb 2-2: new SuperSpeed USB device number 11 using xhci_hcd
[16073.617618] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=a578, bcdDevice= 1.00
[16073.617629] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[16073.617633] usb 2-2: Product: SABRENT
[16073.617636] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: SABRENT
[16073.617639] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: DD5641988396B
[16073.621358] scsi host0: uas
[16073.622070] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access SABRENT 4102 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[16073.624565] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[16087.663473] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Spinning up disk...


what is the freezer trick exactly?
Pop the disk into the freezer for a few hours (or a day). It has to be long enough for the components to all get cold. This shrinks the materials and could possibly unstick heads from the platters. I think it has worked two out of four attempts for me. This is a method to get access to the data of which you should extract as soon as possible.
Be cautious of condensation on the cold disk as it could potentially arc circuitry.
It was a method to unstick stuck drive platters, but hasn’t worked since HDD manufacturing processes changed a few years ago. May work for certain drives manufacted pre-Covid, but that’s it:
https://datarecovery.com/rd/the-hard-drive-freezer-trick/
Nothing in that link explains why i wouldnt work anymore