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...
take it out of that adapter. lots of people giving good tips but it’s not worth assuming anything about the drive till you plug it directly in. that’s a pretty high capacity drive, and shitty adapters can misbehave in fascinating ways.
faint clicking is normal from a drive of this size. bigger drives make bigger noises (especially those designed for use in enterprise environments).
when you plug it in, run smartctl -a on it and post it here. that’ll be definitive for what’s up before you try any of the more creative solutions here.