Buffalo external drive issue

[Alan Messenger]

Hello all

I am new to posting on this forum. I have used a Buffalo external hard drive in recent years, usually with an iMac desktop. I hadn't used it for some months; I tried it a few days back.
Nothing much happening. Not appearing in Disk Utility. The blue power light flashes, and it warmed up, slightly. It is I believe 500GB.
Ref. HD-PV320U2.
I thought the USB cable might be a little slow for powering up. I have just tried, briefly, with another machine, a PC. This brought sounds of the drive moving, and and ominous repetitive clicking sound. Not appearing as a device.

I have some of the data elsewhere, but would like to check. The drive is small, and appears to be a sealed unit- no access that I can see.

I would be grateful for advice from more experienced and wiser heads!

Alan

[MWCSystems]

Hard drives clicking is usually indicative of failure. The sound you hear is the armature trying to move, this armature holds the magnetic read/write head. When the drive is not in use the armature docks in a plastic holder. I have seen drives fail to dock properly and crash on the holder, once this happens the drive is kaput. If the data is extremely important the platters can be physically removed and put into another drive, but this operation is very technical and difficult.

Here is an image of the dock. I took this out of a hard drive that was clicking and would not work.