2TB is about 60€ now... don't be too sad

i'm not sad. this is just one of many hdds. 1st failure in a while though.

if he dies, he dies

hddregen ;)

RIP

Immediately back up all data, this will only get worse:(
After you backed it up, you may use it again, try to update FW or attempt recovery, but not before:)

For your future HDDs, there are many utilities out there (e.g.: hdsentinel or speedfan) to inspect the S.M.A.R.T status of your disks. I'm not saying S.M.A.R.T is reliable or fail-proof , but better than nothing, it's worth to run them once in each quarter or so. (for example, if the temp is regularly goes above 40C (104F) the plates will age much faster)

That's sad, I like to keep all my old drives even when they become too slow, I just use them as a backup or for downloaded/temporary files. (I have a SATA to USB2 adater for that purpose)

To feel a bit safer I check the SMART data regularly with HDtune, as well as do benchmarks to see if the performance remains stable over time. The error checking is pretty cool too, although I don't do it too often tbh (bit long). As kapca said it's not fail-proof but it's much better than nothing and there's nothing complicated or time consuming about it.

HDtune Pro is even better (not free but it's easy to find a key, can send you one if you're afraid to go on some odd russian site)