Yesterday, my drive started making soft clicking noises, like something was accessing or indexing the drive or like something's trying to read or write to the drive, but it can't. When I tried to click on a folder, it took a few seconds for the folder to open, which is unusual. When I tried to delete 18 empty folders, it took about 30 minutes!

I then ran a chkdisk (from a DOS window) and it took over 2 hours!
There were a lot of problems- not with the drive, but while running the chkdsk. When I ran the command, the window sat for about 10 minutes, then it gave me the message asking if I wanted to dismount the drive to fix it. I said Yes, and then the window sat for another 20 minutes. While it sat, the drive was still making soft clicking noises.
Then, chkdsk started running. It got through step 1 of 3, then worked through step 2 of 3, but then stopped at 68% of "scanning index processes". It sat there for another 45 minutes (and the drive was making the same clicking sound). Then chkdsk started up again. It found about 75 "orphaned files" which it put into a new file (though I couldn't find where it put these files). Then chkdsk stopped again, then started up again, then stopped, then started, until it finally finished.

I then turned off and unplugged the drive, plugged into into a different extension cord, then turned it on.
It then worked fine for the rest of the night! I was able to make some large product zip files and even upload them to TurboSquid without any problems.

But the drive is giving me the same problems today. I tried uploading the same product zip files to The3DStudio, but the uploader stopped and the drive started making the same soft clicking noises. I was able to open folders and copy sales images from the external drive to my C drive, but I couldn't copy the product zip files: first Windows Explorer sat (with the "waiting" mouse pointer), then it said "Not Responding"... all while making the same soft clicking noises.

I tried plugging the drive into a different USB port, but the same thing happened: I couldn't copy the zip files and the drive made the clicking sound. I then tried another USB cable and the same thing happened again: the zip file didn't copy and Windows Explorer said "Not Responding".

Does anyone have any good ideas about what might be going on?

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