Hard Drive Death?

My Seagate Cuda 1Tb with firmware SD15 decided to stop working last night. It's only 2 years old, and hasn't had a whole lot of work. It's in my home pc as a storage drive, but I do stream music and video off it occasionally.

It wasn't having any problems, and then WHAM. There she blows!

Firstly, I booted my computer and wondered "What is that noise?"

I sounded like a cooling fan was starting and stopping, or maybe the CD drive was "pulsing".

Secondly, I checked all the connections, and still no good.

Thirdly, I pulled the HDD out and put it up to another PSU (in case my PSU was dying) and it was the same.

I can feel a constant slight vibration (I am assuming this is the platter spinning at 7200rpm), and then there is a heavier vibration that causes the "noise" (I assume the head or actuator motor making it). The noise is not a sharp "tapping" like the head is slamming against the stops, nor a "grinding" like the head is contacting the platter. It's a slight noise sort of like when a 3.5" floppy disc starts to read (just after the metal shutter gets opened by the drive mechanism).

The only thing I can think of to further diagnose the problem is finding another working Cuda with the same firmware, and swap PCB's.

I'm not prepared to spend $500 and more to get the data recovered.

Anybody have a clue as to what this might be?

You have the hard drive click of death. It is a major malfunction and you are going to need a new hard drive.

Basically if you want your data you need to recover it or else you are going to have to start clean.