Hey Rocket, don't know if you still have the drive, but if you've tried everything here is something that has worked for me in the past (more than once).

I used to have some Samsung drives.  To be fair they lasted well and were always super-quiet when running, but being mechanical they were always going to fail sooner or later.  The death of both those drivers were that they eventually refused to spin-up, and beileve it or not I was able to repair both of those drives and recover may data by dropping them carefully against a hard-flat surface using a certain technique.

Basically, I removed the drive, stood it 'on end' on a table, then knocked it over so that it landed 'right way up' against the surface with a nice even slap.  That's all I did, stuck it back in the computer and it was fine.  Did exactly the same when the second one eventually failed, and again, it worked.  I recovered the data from both drives and those drives are still working to this day although I just use them for messing around with Linux stuff these days.

I'm not recommending anyone do this, but it worked for me where the failure was the drives not spinning up, they just appeared to be dead.

I use Samsung drives as I have found them to be both quiet and reliable, but as you say anything mechanical will fail eventually especially if spinning at high speed for most it's life.

I would not normally encourage being rough with any hard drive but it strikes me that, if it is refusing to spin up, there is very little to loose.  I would certainly give it a go - thanks for the tip. 

 

 

I use Poser 13 on Windows 11 - For Scene set up I use a Geekcom A5 -  Ryzen 9 5900HX, with 64 gig ram and 3 TB  storage, mini PC with final rendering done on normal sized desktop using an AMD Ryzen Threadipper 1950X CPU, Corsair Hydro H100i CPU cooler, 3XS EVGA GTX 1080i SC with 11g Ram, 4 X 16gig Corsair DDR4 Ram and a Corsair RM 100 PSU .   The desktop is in a remote location with rendering done via Queue Manager which gives me a clearer desktop and quieter computer room.